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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 


















THE WORLD'S 
GREATEST CLASSIC 


BY 

ARCHIBALD McCULLAGH 
A.M., D.D.; LL.D. 



BOSTON 

RICHARD G. BADGER 

THE GORHAM PRESS 



Copyright, 1922 , by Richard G. Badger 


All Rights Reserved 

1b ‘Sssa 
.VI ^ 5“ 



Made in the United States of America 


Press of J. J. Little & Ives Company, New York, U. S. A. 


DEC -i '22 


© C1A692184 


TO 

MY CHILDREN 

















CONTENTS 


CHAPTER PAGE 

I The World’s Greatest Classic n 

II What Does the Inspiration of the Holy Scrip- 
tures Mean? 29 

III The Crowning Jewel of Literature .... 40 

IV Creedal Safety 52 

V The Incomparable Teacher 63 

VI Things Which Speak the Praise of God’s Glory 78 

VII The Supreme Challenge 91 

VIII The Most Wonderful People of All History . . 103 

IX The Dream of Pilate’s Wife 124 

X The Blackest Crime of History 134 

XI The Queen of Sheba 142 

XII Life a Continuous Battle 150 

XIII The Significance and Design of the Transfig- 

uration 163 

XIV After Death — What? 174 

XV The Nature and Occupation of Angels . . . 185 

XVI The Satisfying Vision 195 



















































THE WORLD’S GREATEST CLASSIC 


THE WORLD'S GREATEST 
CLASSIC 


i 

THE WORLD’S GREATEST CLASSIC 

Contemplated from any standpoint the Bible is 
a unique phenomenon. Considered either as to 
the facts and truths which it contains, or the liter- 
ary forms in which these facts and truths are cast 
or the results which it has produced and is con- 
stantly producing in the world, it is unquestion- 
ably the most wonderful Book in existence. To 
it alone we stand indebted for that knowledge of 
the origin of the universe material, vital, mental 
and spiritual which delivers our minds from the 
vague and unsatisfying theories propounded by 
human reason and for that simple and sublime 
system of religious faith which emancipates our 
soul from the bondage of degrading idolatry and 
furnishes us with correct notions of the charac- 
ter of God, the origin, nature and destiny of 
man. “What,” asks Professor Arnold Guyot 
“have science and philosophy to say of the prim- 

ii 


12 


The World’s Greatest Classic 


ordial creation of the matter of the universe ? Ab- 
solutely nothing. Creation out of nothing is a 
fact beyond their pale: it is the miracle of mir- 
acles. n Hence the necessity of a direct revela- 
tion of the truth of creation as an ultimate fact, 
which could not be reached by any process of rea- 
soning, but which being accepted makes clear to 
the mind and heart the relations of the universe 
and of man to God. 

The Bible is not a history in which the rise, 
progress and decay of nations are traced and yet 
no historian can push his researches back beyond 
a certain limit without lighting his torch at its 
blaze and borrowing his facts from its store 
house. It is not a poem and yet no poet ever 
tuned his harp to sing such lofty strains as the 
bards of the Bible. It is not an allegory and yet 
it abounds in the sublimest parables ever penned 
or uttered. It teaches no particular system of 
philosophy and yet no true philosophy is at var- 
iance with its principles. Though parts of it were 
written thousands of years before some of the 
physical sciences were born, yet amid all their star- 
tling disclosures, the new wonders which they have 
unveiled, there is not an authenticated fact of 
science which cannot be explained in harmony with 
its teachings. It may be safely affirmed that when 
science shall have reached the highest pinnacle of 
its possible attainments, its last established results 


The World's Greatest Classic 13 

will be found to be in accord with the Bible. This 
is so because that Cosmos we call Nature and the 
Bible are the products of the same Author. Here 
is a book written by about forty different authors 
of widely different natural endowments and ac- 
quired culture, representing in its authorship all 
classes of society from the King on his throne to 
the Shepherd in his tent and the fisherman in his 
boat, written in various lands, on the banks of 
the Nile, in the desert of Arabia, in the valley of 
the Euphrates, amid the hills and vales of Pales- 
tine, in classic Greece and Imperial Rome, writ- 
ten too in different languages, through a period 
extending over nearly sixteen hundred years, and 
yet as truly a unit as if the product of a single 
mind. 

How explain this unmatched phenomenon on 
any other theory than its Divine Origin? The 
loftiest products ever born of human intellect have 
never secured that hold on the world, nor wielded 
that potential and permanent influence over the 
intellect and the heart of man that the Bible has 
done wherever known. “The very translation of 
it,” as the eloquent Robertson has said, “has fixed 
language and settled the idioms of speech for Ger- 
many and England speak as they speak because 
the Bible was translated.” 

The Bible has a right to a place in the curricu- 
lum of educational institutions because it contains 


14 The World's Greatest Classic 

the loftiest, the grandest and the most important 
truths which can challenge the attention of man. 
This is an age when the value of education is ap- 
preciated and its importance accentuated as prob- 
ably never before. When you consider man as in 
possession of capacities for being and doing which 
admit of almost limitless expansion, it must be ad- 
mitted that education is one of the most efficient 
agents for elevating him in the scale of being. 
There are those who tell us that if this great Re- 
public is to preserve and perpetuate her free in- 
stitutions, if our government which proceeds from 
the people is to be guided by wise and upright 
men, then you must educate the masses whose 
votes determine who the makers and administra- 
tors of our laws shall be, that they may wield in- 
telligently and for the best interests of society the 
tremendous power lodged in their hands. “You 
will do the greatest service to the state,” says 
Epictetus, “if you shall raise not the roofs of the 
houses, but the souls of the citizens : for it is bet- 
ter that great souls should dwell in small houses 
rather than for mean slaves to lurk in great 
houses.” “Education,” says Wendell Phillips, 
“is the only interest worthy the deep controlling 
anxiety of thoughtful man.” There never was a 
time when private wealth was so munificently be- 
stowed to found schools, establish academies, 
equip colleges, endow universities and build libra- 


The World's Greatest Classic 15 

ries as in the present day. There never was a 
period in the history of the world when so many 
facilities were at command and so many agencies 
were in operation to render the treasures of learn- 
ing accessible to every class of society. What is 
education? The word defines itself. It is the 
drawing out or leading forth of the faculties, the 
developing and strengthening of the intellect, the 
training of the mind to think for itself, to under- 
stand man as he is, the material universe as it 
has been created and God as far as He has been 
pleased to reveal Himself. Leave out of consid- 
eration the inspiration of the Bible, and all those 
claims peculiar to it as a revelation and simply 
regard it as a body of literature, and it can be 
safely claimed that its study will do more to ex- 
pand the mind and widen the intellectual horizon 
than any other book in existence. There is noth- 
ing that will more effectively increase the vigor of 
the mind, evoke every latent faculty and arouse 
every dormant energy than confronting it with 
great truths and compelling it to grapple with the 
difficulties necessary to their comprehension. Are 
there any truths sublimer than God, His unde- 
rived existence, the infinitude of His wisdom, 
power and dominion; the immortality of the soul, 
the mysteries of Redemption and the glories of 
the eternal world as portrayed on the pages of 
the sacred Scriptures? Can the discoveries of 


1 6 The World's Greatest Classic 

the telescope, vast and overwhelming as they are, 
or the invisible prodigies of skill unveiled by the 
microscope, wonderful as they are, or the secrets 
of matter and life brought to light in the labora- 
tories of the chemist and the biologist, instructive 
as they are, equal in grandeur and importance 
these truths? Bacon says, “Some books are to be 
tasted, others to be swallowed and some few to be 
chewed and digested.” It is to the latter class 
that the Bible belongs. 

Not only does the Bible contain the sublimest 
truths which can challenge the attention of man, 
but its literary beauties are manifold and very 
striking. When God fashioned this planet as a 
home for man, built its mountains and scooped 
its valleys, dug its seas and channeled its rivers; 
carpeted it with verdure and adorned it with lakes, 
forests and flowers and hung it in its orbit and 
sent it singing among the stars, how much labor 
He spent upon its mere ornamentation. In mak- 
ing provisions for man’s bodily wants He did 
not fail to provide for the development and grati- 
fication of his innate taste for the sublime and the 
beautiful. So when God furnished man with a 
guide to immortality He did not give him a dic- 
tionary, or a directory, or a mere collection of 
dry facts and cold precepts. The inspiration of 
its authors did not interfere with their mental 
idiosyncrasies. Between no two of them is there 


The World's Greatest Classic 


17 


a sameness of style. There is the stately narra- 
tive style of Moses; the dramatic style of Job; the 
lyric style of David; the sententious aphoristic 
style of Solomon; the brilliant majestic style of 
Isaiah; the oracular style of Ezekiel; the elegiac 
style of Jeremiah; the ardent masculine style of 
Peter; the involved, argumentative, parentheti- 
cal style of Paul; the tender pellucid style of John. 
For simplicity and fascination of narrative, gran- 
deur of description, sublimity of poetry, tender- 
ness of pathos and wisdom of proverb the Bible 
has no rival. 

It would be easy to cull from its pages rare 
specimens of oratory. There is the plea of Judah 
with Joseph in behalf of Benjamin, the sentence 
pronounced upon Saul by Samuel, the challenge 
of Elijah, the valedictory of Jesus, and Paul on 
the Areopagus. If oratory is to be judged by a 
skillful use of circumstances, a masterful marshal- 
ing of arguments as the orator moves from 
premise to conclusion and by the immediate ef- 
fect produced upon the minds of the listeners, then 
Paul in his defense before Festus, Felix and 
Agrippa will not suffer seriously even if compared 
with Demosthenes, to whom the world by uni- 
versal consent has awarded the palm of oratory. 

The obligations of the fine arts, poetry, paint- 
ing and music to the Bible are incalculable. The 
great masters in these various departments of hu- 


1 8 The World's Greatest Classic 

man culture have either taken from the Bible the 
subjects on which the mightiest efforts of their 
powers have been expended, or stand indebted to 
its exhaustless suggestiveness for many of their 
grandest ideas. When John Milton would write 
a poem worthy of his imperial genius and vast 
erudition where did he go for a suitable subject? 
If Moses had not narrated the fall of man Milton 
never could have written “Paradise Lost.” Take 
from that poem which is probably the grandest 
epic the world has ever possessed, the ideas, 
thoughts, metaphors and language borrowed from 
the Bible and you destroy it. Burns is probably 
the greatest modern lyrist. Certainly no other 
poet has touched and thrilled the heart of a na- 
tion as he has. “His songs,” Carlyle says, “are 
a part of the mother tongue — of the millions that 
in all the ends of the earth speak the British 
language,” and he affirms that “in hut or hall as 
the heart unfolds itself in many-colored joy and 
woe of existence the name, the voice of that joy 
and that woe is the name of the voice which 
Burns has given them.” Burns drew much of 
the inspiration that has given immortality to his 
writings from the Bible. Volumes have been writ- 
ten to show how much Shakespeare, the poet of 
human nature, whom Ben Jonson says, “neither 
man nor muse can praise too much,” owes to the 
Bible. 


The World’s Greatest Classic 19 

Where did the acknowledged masters in the art 
of painting go for the subjects of their greatest 
efforts? Raphael (who by universal consent 
stands in the forefront of the world’s greatest 
painters) found in “The Transfiguration” a sub- 
ject suited to his transcendent genius. The subject 
of Michael Angelo’s masterpiece, a painting those 
most competent to judge pronounce unparalleled 
for the powers of invention and the consummate 
knowledge of the human figure which it displays 
is “The Last Judgment.” 

Leonardo da Vinci who as a painter is ranked 
with Raphael and Angelo employed his brush in 
painting “The Last Supper.” The list might be 
swelled and if exhausted it would include the mas- 
terpieces of nearly all the world. 

But music not less than painting is indebted to 
the Bible. Have not such masters of Symphony 
as Handel, Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven gone 
to it for the subjects of their magnificent oratorios, 
such as Creation, Samson, Elijah, The Messiah? 

The Bible contains the principles of human free- 
dom and has proved itself in every age to be the 
promoter and defender of civil and religious lib- 
erty. The history of the past shows that the na- 
tions that have been robbed of their rights and 
scourged by tyrants, the nations on which despots 
have riveted their chains have been those who were 
ignorant of the Bible. When Nero and Caligula 


20 The World's Greatest Classic 

were Emperors of Rome ; when Henry VIII ruled 
England; when Philip II was Autocrat of Spain 
and Charles IX sat on the throne of France, the 
Bible was an unknown Book in each of these 
countries. Would anyone of these despots whose 
inhuman cruelties even now, after the lapse of cen- 
turies thrill us with horror, be tolerated on any 
throne in Christendom to-day? Throw down be- 
fore you the map of the world and tell me what 
nations are in the vanguard of civilization? Is 
it not a fact beyond the power of dispute that 
larger civil and religious liberty is enjoyed, and 
a higher standard of education and morals exist 
among the peoples of Bible reading and Bible lov- 
ing lands than in nations ignorant of it? 

Where are the most ignorant and degraded peo- 
ples of the world to be found? In Christendom, 
or outside of it? Compare England with Persia. 
How account for the superiority of the former 
to the latter in everything that gives dignity and 
grandeur to man? Remember before England 
had a place on the map of the civilized world, 
when her sons were painted savages, roaming in 
the forests and living by plunder, Persia had a 
stable government, vast disciplined armies and 
could boast of her statesmen, philosophers and 
poets. But to-day while the people of England 
enjoy large civil and religious liberty and her pos- 
sessions belt the globe, and wherever her flag goes 


The W orld* s Greatest Classic 


21 


there goes respect for law and protection to indi- 
vidual rights, the people of Persia are immersed 
in ignorance and poverty and are ground beneath 
the heel of a heartless despotism. Is not this dif- 
ference due to the fact that one possessed the 
Bible while the other did not? Rousseau, that 
brilliant genius who contended with Voltaire for 
Kingship in the realm of French literature in the 
eighteenth century laid no claims to be a Christian 
and never posed as a Puritan, says, “I confess the 
majesty of the Scriptures strikes me with admira- 
tion as the purity of the gospel has its influence 
on my heart. Pursue the works of philosophers 
with all their pomp of diction; how contemptible 
are they compared with the Scriptures. Is it pos- 
sible that a book so simple and so sublime should 
be merely the work of man?” 

Sir William Jones, the great Oriental Scholar, 
who was more or less acquainted with twenty- 
eight languages wrote on the blank leaf of his 
Bible thus : “I have regularly and attentively per- 
used the Holy Scriptures and am of the opinion 
that this volume independently of its divine origin 
contains more true sublimity, more exquisite 
beauty, more pure morality and finer strains of 
poetry and eloquence than can be collected from 
all the books in whatever age or language they 
may have been written.” “Consider,” says Pro- 
fessor Huxley, “the great historical fact that for 


22 The World’s Greatest Classic 

three centuries this book has been woven into the 
life of all that is best and noblest in English his- 
tory: that it has been the national epic of Britain 
and is familiar to noble and simple from John 
o’ Groat’s house to Land’s End as Dante and 
Tasso were once to the Italians, that it is written 
in the noblest and purest English and abounds in 
exquisite beauties of a merely literary form; and 
finally that it forbids the veriest hind who has 
never left his village to be ignorant of the exist- 
ence of other countries and other civilizations and 
of a great past stretching back to the furthest 
limits of the oldest nations in the world. By the 
study of what other book could children be so 
much humanized and made to feel that each figure 
in that vast historical procession fills, like them- 
selves, but a momentary space in the interval be- 
tween two eternities ; and earn the blessings or the 
curses of all time according to its efforts to do 
good and hate evil, even as they are also earning 
their payment for their work?” 

Goethe said that the book of Ruth is the loveli- 
est specimen of epic and idyllic poetry which we 
possess. Alexander Humboldt has pointed out the 
fact that a single psalm, the 104th, contains a 
representation of the whole cosmos. Edmund 
Burke, of whom Dr. Samuel Johnson said, “No 
man of sense could meet by accident under a gate- 
way to avoid a shower without being convinced 


The World’s Greatest Classic 23 

that he was the first man in England,” declared 
that the most impressive document bearing on the 
rights of man is the Sermon on the Mount. When 
Samuel T. Coleridge, whose knowledge was en- 
cyclopedic, was asked what was the richest treas- 
ure of literature he replied, “The beatitudes.” 

In the name of simple justice I claim that this 
grand old book which has come down to us from 
the far-off centuries freighted with the most im- 
portant knowledge and the most precious truth, 
this book with its thrilling narratives, lofty poe- 
try, soul-stirring appeals of eloquence and match- 
less deeds of moral heroism, this book whose 
teachings have proved the strongest bulwark 
against the spread of ignorance, despotism and 
vice, and have done more to destroy slavery, ban- 
ish caste and develop among people of different 
languages and nationalities a feeling of brother- 
hood, and elevate woman to her proper position, 
I say in the name of simple* justice, I claim that 
this grand old book whose track down the ages is 
the luminous path along which the highest civili- 
zation has traveled, and which numbers among its 
believers and expounders some of the brightest 
ornaments of philosophy, science and literature, 
should have a high place in the curriculum of edu- 
cational institutions. 

To fully appreciate the incomparable worth of 
this book of books we must take into considera- 


24 The World's Greatest Classic 

tion man’s religious nature and its power to meet 
the wants and aspirations of that nature. Among 
all the nations and tribes of the earth, no people 
has ever yet been found among whom there did 
not exist some notion, however crude and dis- 
torted, of a Supreme Being. In all men of every 
clime, savage and civilized, there is a faculty, call 
it what you will, a divine light or a sense of moral 
obligation, or conscience, that discerns between 
acts as to their moral quality. A belief that cer- 
tain acts are wrong and deserving of punishment, 
is instinctive and universal. Religion is inwrought 
into the very being of man as thoroughly as iron 
is mingled with the blood. Professor John Tyn- 
dall was right when he said, “The world will 
have a religion even if it goes to the intellectual 
whoredom of modern spiritualism for it.” No 
matter whether religion be Christian or Pagan, 
true or false, it is the most powerful passion that 
controls the mind or agitates the breast of man. 
In obedience to its dictates the pagan idolator has 
voluntarily submitted to barbarous rites, laid his 
own offspring under the sacrificial knife, even 
flung his body beneath the crushing chariot wheels 
of his god; and the Christian martyr has unhesi- 
tatingly walked to the blazing stake, or laid his 
neck on the executioner’s block. Empires and 
Kingdoms have been convulsed and the world 
shaken by religious wars. There is not a nation 


The World’s Greatest Classic 


25 


on the face of the earth to-day worthy the name 
of a nation that would not turn its citizens into 
soldiers, its factories into arsenals, its growing 
fields into camping grounds and go to war for the 
sake of religion. The Bible principally addresses 
itself to the religious nature of man. Take any 
of those great questions in which all men are 
deeply interested, and over which the most 
thoughtful have earnestly and anxiously pondered, 
such a question as the immortality of the soul 
and how luminous are its teachings on this point 
compared with human speculations. There is 
something pathetic in the picture that Plato gives 
in his apology of Socrates the most philosophic 
mind of the ancient world, all of whose teachings 
were ethical in their tone, when about to pass into 
the unseen world, not knowing whether immor- 
tality was a pleasing delusion, the dream of his 
fancy, or a glorious reality. “The materialistic 
assumption,” says Mr. John Fiske, “that there is 
no future state and that the life of the soul ac- 
cordingly ends with the life of the body, is per- 
haps the most colossal instance of baseless as- 
sumption that is known to the history of phi- 
losophy.” “I believe,” he adds, “in the immor- 
tality of the soul not in the sense in which I ac- 
cept the demonstrable truths of science, but as a 
supreme act of faith in the reasonableness of 
God’s work.” Sir Humphry Davy was a man 


2 6 The World's Greatest Classic 

who reaped high honor in the domain of science 
and was courted in the circles of fashion, a man 
on whose brilliant career the shadow of disap- 
pointed earthly hopes seems never to have fallen. 
“I envy,” said he, “no quality of mind or intel- 
lect in others, not genius, power, wit or fancy; 
but if I could choose what would be most delight- 
ful and I believe most useful to me, I should pre- 
fer a firm religious belief to every other bless- 
ing; for it makes life a discipline of goodness, 
creates new hopes when all earthly hopes vanish 
and throws over the decay and destruction of 
existence the most gorgeous of all lights; calling 
up the most delightful visions where the sensualist 
and skeptic view only gloom, decay and annihila- 
tion.” 

When Daniel Webster lay dying at Marshfield, 
he dictated this inscription for his monument: 
“Lord I believe : help Thou mine unbelief. Phil- 
osophic argument, especially that drawn from the 
vastness of the Universe in comparison with the 
apparent insignificance of the globe, has sometimes 
shaken my reason for the faith that is in me ; but 
my heart has assured and reassured me that the 
Gospel of Jesus Christ must be a Divine reality. 
The Sermon on the Mount cannot be a merely hu- 
man production. This belief enters into the depths 
of my conscience. The whole history of man 
proves it.” And just before the gates of the un- 


The World’s Greatest Classic 27 

seen world swung open for him to pass through 
he said, almost with his last breath, “What would 
the condition of any of us be, if we had not the 
hope of immortality? What ground is there to 
rest upon but the Gospel?” 

“Books,” says Milton, “are not dead things, 
but do contain a potency of life active as the soul 
whose progeny they are. They are the precious 
life blood of a master spirit embalmed and treas- 
ured up on purpose to a life beyond life.” What 
a priceless precious treasure is this book of books, 
the Bible! Standing to-day amid the triumphs 
of Christianity which has girdled the earth with 
her churches and which chants her anthems and 
reads her oracles in hundreds of different lan- 
guages and dialects there is no fear that the 
Bible will lose its influence over the intellect, the 
conscience and the heart of the world. “The 
grass withereth and the flower thereof falleth 
away, but the word of our God standeth for- 
ever.” 

Winkelman, a classic writer on the fine arts, 
gave this advice to artists in regard to the Apollo 
Belvedere : “Go and study it, and if you see no 
great beauty in it to captivate you go again. And 
if you still discover none go again and again. Go 
until you find it; for be sure it is there.” This is 
an appropriate advice to give in regard to the 
World’s Great Classic. If you have never found 


28 


The World's Greatest Classic 


the Bible to contain the sublimest truths which can 
challenge the intellect of man clothed in literary 
forms of surpassing beauty; if you have never dis- 
covered its peerless power to strengthen and de- 
velop the intellectual faculties, widen the mental 
horizon and satisfy the wants and aspirations of 
the soul go and study it until you find things for 
be sure they are there. 


II 


WHAT DOES THE INSPIRATION OF 
THE HOLY SCRIPTURES MEAN? 

Daniel Webster, being asked upon one occasion 
how he succeeded in having such clear and trans- 
parent ideas on every subject, which he discussed, 
replied, “By attention to definition.” Is not the 
cause of many distorted conceptions of Biblical 
truths and misapprehensions of Christian doc- 
trines due to inadequate attention to definitions? 
There is a class of writers who speak of inspira- 
tion in a loose, misleading sense, as equivalent to 
great intellectual endowment or genius. They 
see no difference between the inspiration of Moses 
and Solon, David and Burns, Solomon and 
Shakespeare, Isaiah and Milton, except it may 
be in degree. What do we mean by inspiration 
when we speak of the writers of the Bible? Bibli- 
cal inspiration is the extraordinary presence of the 
Holy Spirit in and with the sacred writers in the 
entire work of writing by which they were quali- 
fied to give a record of the matters which God 
designed them to communicate free from error. 
This being so, the inspiration of the writers of the 
29 


30 The World’s Greatest Classic 

Bible differs from the intellectual illumination 
possessed by such great geniuses as Newton, Bacon 
and Shakespeare who penetrated deeper and saw 
farther into the hidden causes of natural phe- 
nomena and the secret workings of the human 
heart than ordinary minds, both in kind and de- 
gree. No man of intelligence and candor can 
pass from the writings of Shakespeare which by 
general consent have been placed in the forefront 
of the world’s literature to the Bible without feel- 
ing that the difference between them is one of 
kind as well as degree. 

It may clear this subject of much of the ob- 
scurity which has gathered around it if we care- 
fully and sharply distinguish inspiration from 
those things with which it is too often confounded, 
but from which it essentially differs. Inspiration 
differs from revelation. The subject matter of 
the Bible is derived from two sources; it consists 
of truths directly and immediately revealed by 
the Holy Spirit to the minds of the writers and of 
events which fell under their own observation, or 
which they learned through various channels — 
events which were known to others as well as to 
them. God, for instance, revealed to Moses the 
order of creation from chaos to cosmos, and the 
nature and form of the religion he was to teach 
the Hebrews, describing its elaborate ritualism 
down to the minutest detail. But when Moses 


The Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures 31 

narrates the character of the departure of the 
Hebrews out of Egypt and describes the wilder- 
ness through which they subsequently passed, he 
states facts and describes scenes which were 
known to multitudes of others as well as to him. 
Paul received the gospel which he preached and 
an account of the institution of the Lord’s Supper 
by revelation, but when he narrated the supernat- 
ural circumstances connected with his conversion, 
he described things which others had witnessed 
as well as he. Between these two things which 
constitute the subject matter of the Bible — the 
direct and immediate disclosures by God of 
truth previously unknown to the mind, and the 
narrative of events which had occurred on the 
earth before the eyes of men — there is a vast and 
obvious difference, but inspiration has to do with 
the written record of both alike. Moses and 
Paul were infallibly guided in narrating the his- 
toric events which were known to others as well 
as to them and also in recording the truths which 
had been directly revealed to them. The func- 
tion of inspiration is to transmit an infallible rec- 
ord of those truths and events which God de- 
signed for the instruction and guidance of man- 
kind, whether they were revelations from heaven 
or the history of events which occurred among 
men. It does not follow from this that every 
statement contained in the Bible is either inspired 


32 The World’s Greatest Classic 

or true ; or that every action recorded is stamped 
with the Divine approval. Care should be exer- 
cised to distinguish between what the Bible re- 
cords and what the Bible inculcates. The Book 
of Job contains the speeches of God, Satan, Job 
and his friends, but neither Satan, Job nor his 
friends spoke by inspiration. The insinuations 
and accusations of Satan were false. The 
speeches of Job’s friends were built on false prem- 
ises and consequently reached conclusions which 
God condemned. Because we believe that Rab- 
shakeh delivered the speech recorded in II Kings 
1 8th Chapter, and Festus delivered the speech 
given in the 25th Chapter of the Acts, it does 
not follow that we must believe that they spoke by 
inspiration. All inspiration does is to assure us 
with infallible certainty that these persons are cor- 
rectly reported and that they uttered the senti- 
ments attributed to them. So the fact that the 
conduct of Gehazi in following Naaman and ask- 
ing him for gifts Elisha had refused, and the 
treachery of Judas in betraying the Son of God 
to death are portrayed in the Bible does not 
stamp their actions with divine approval. In- 
spiration simply assures us that these men acted 
as they are represented. 

Inspiration does not mean verbal dictation. 
There are specimens of verbal dictation in the 
Bible. Doubtless in the Decalogue we have the 


The Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures 33 

very words which Jehovah uttered on Mount 
Sinai and then wrote on slabs cut from the granite 
rocks of Horeb. But the instances of verbal dic- 
tation are few. The minds of the writers of the 
Bible were not passive when inspired. They were 
not in the hands of the Holy Spirit as the uncon- 
scious instrument is in the hands of the musician 
who causes it to send forth whatever sounds he 
pleases. The Holy Spirit was in them and with 
them guiding their minds, stimulating their mem- 
ories without interfering with their conscious free- 
dom, or destroying their individual idiosyncrasies. 
This is seen in the fact that the different writers 
differ so widely in style. The style of Isaiah dif- 
fers as much from the style of Paul as the style 
of Bishop Butler in his “Analogy” differs from 
Addison in the “Spectator.” 

Inspiration is not to be confounded with per- 
sonal holiness. Pharaoh and Nebuchadnezzar 
were bad men and yet they received supernatural 
communications from God as well as Abraham 
and Joseph who were distinguished for their piety. 
Although Balaam was a bad man yet once he was 
inspired and compelled to act as the mouthpiece 
of Jehovah and utter sublime prophecies in re- 
gard to the approaching conquests and future 
glory of the Hebrews at the very moment he had 
been hired by their enemy to curse them. In- 
spiration simply renders a man when he speaks as 


34 The World's Greatest Classic 

God’s representative infallible so that whether he 
foretells some future event or narrates an his- 
toric fact, or teaches a doctrine, or inculcates a 
duty, what he says is free from error or mistake. 

The inspiration of the Bible does not involve 
the inspiration of the translators. Previous to 
the invention of printing, copies of the Scrip- 
tures could only be multiplied by the pen. Even 
though the utmost care was exercised in the tran- 
scription of manuscript, mistakes might and did 
creep into these copies. The translation of these 
copies from the Hebrew and Greek tongues into 
the Latin, English, German and other languages 
was a human work performed by fallible men. 
The acknowledged existence of such inaccuracies 
in the common text has led to repeated revisions 
of the Scriptures. Inspiration is claimed only for 
the autograph text, but in the revisions that have 
been made in the light of recent progress in arch- 
aeology, philology and Biblical criticism, not a sin- 
gle truth or vital doctrine of Christianity has been 
disturbed. Only verbal inaccuracies incidental to 
the work of transcription have been discovered. 

The proofs of the inspiration are numerous and 
varied. It will be sufficient to indicate a few of 
them. We have the testimony of our Lord Him- 
self in regard to both the Old and the New Testa- 
ments. In His discussions with the Jews and in 
His teachings, He appealed to the Old Testa- 


The Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures 35 

ment in a way which implied that He considered 
it divine in its origin and authoritative in its ut- 
terance. He urged His hearers to search the 
Scriptures affirming that they portrayed His char- 
acter and foretold His work. “Had ye believed 
Moses ye would have believed me.” To His op- 
ponents who propounded to Him a question in 
the hope of entangling Him: “Ye do err, not 
knowing the Scriptures.” This passage read in 
its connection shows that He regarded the Scrip- 
tures as authoritative and infallible. This same 
truth He affirmed in the strongest terms to His 
disciples subsequent to His resurrection. To the 
two disciples whom He joined as they journeyed 
to Emmaus, He said: “O fools and slow of heart, 
to believe all that the prophets have spoken; 
Ought not Christ to have suffered these things 
and to enter into His glory? And beginning at 
Moses and all the prophets, He expounded unto 
them in all the Scriptures the things concerning 
Himself.” And to the assembled apostles in the 
upper room in the evening of the day that He 
rose from the dead, He said: “These are the 
words which I spake unto you while I was yet 
with you that all things must be fulfilled which 
were written in the law of Moses and in the proph- 
ets and in the psalms concerning Me. Then 
opened He their understandings that they might 
understand the Scriptures.” It is unnecessary to 


36 The World's Greatest Classic 

multiply citations to show that Christ affirmed 
the inspiration of the Old Testament. He is not 
less explicit in regard to the inspiration of the 
New Testament. When He commissioned His 
apostles to go out into the world as His ambas- 
sadors, He said to them: “When they deliver 
you up, take no thought how or what ye shall 
speak. For it is not ye that speak but the spirit 
of your Father which speaketh in you.” Thus 
He affirms that when the apostles were called to 
defend His cause they would be miraculously 
guided by the Holy Spirit. And in His farewell 
discourse delivered on the eve of His crucifixion, 
He said: “The Holy Ghost, whom the Father 
will send in my name, He shall teach you all 
things and bring all things to your remembrance 
whatsoever I have said unto you.” “He will 
guide you into all truth; for He shall not speak 
of Himself; but whatsoever He shall hear that 
shall He speak; and He will show you things to 
come.” If these words mean anything, they teach 
that the apostles were under the immediate guid- 
ance of the Holy Spirit, both in narrating past 
events and in recording things which were to be 
revealed to them. 

The apostles also affirmed the inspiration of 
the Old Testament and declared that what its 
writers said God said. They asserted their own 
inspiration and God endorsed their claims, ap- 


The Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures 37 

proved of their teachings by signs and wonders 
and miracles. 

The unity of the Bible, the singleness of pur- 
pose which pervades it from beginning to end 
is another proof of its inspiration. All in it 
centers in one Person — that of the Redeemer, 
and has respect to one object — that of the redemp- 
tion of the race from sin. The very fact that 
it was written by so many men, differing so widely 
in native endowment and culture, living in lands 
so greatly unlike and so many centuries apart, yet 
all dominated by the same purpose is a strong 
proof that they must have been under the im- 
mediate guidance of the Holy Spirit. Although 
the Bible was not written for the purpose of teach- 
ing science, philosophy, ethnology or history, and 
when it touches upon these subjects it touches 
upon them incidentally, yet it is never in error on 
these points. Much of the Bible was written at 
a time when the most cultured, philosophic and 
scientific men in the world believed and taught 
absurd and childish theories in regard to the 
origin, nature and structure of the universe. Who 
kept the writers of the Bible from error so that 
their teachings are in harmony with the latest 
established facts in all these departments of pro- 
gressive knowledge? The writers of the Old 
and the New Testament themselves, the Lord 
Jesus Christ and the Christian church in all ages 


38 The World’s Greatest Classic 

reply that it was the Holy Spirit. The transform- 
ing and ennobling effect of its teaching upon in- 
dividual and national character supports its lofty 
claims. Are not the nations which walk in its 
light in the vanguard of the world’s civiliza- 
tion? It is as easy to believe that human power 
called the matter of the universe out of the womb 
of nonentity, set the sun in the heavens and 
launched the stars in their orbits as that the Bible 
is simply and wholly human in its origin. 

“Inspiration is a special energy of the Spirit 
of God upon the mind and heart of selected and 
prepared human agents which does not obstruct 
nor impair their native and normal activities, nor 
miraculously enlarge the boundaries of their 
knowledge except where essential to the inspir- 
ing purpose; but stimulates and assists them to 
the clear discernment and faithful utterance of 
truth and fact which could not otherwise have 
been known. By such direction and aid through 
spoken and written words in combination with 
any divinely ordered circumstances with which 
they may be historically interwoven, the result 
contemplated in the purpose of God is realized in 
a progressive revelation of His wisdom, right- 
eousness and grace for the instruction and moral 
elevation of men. The revelation so produced is 
permanent and infallible for all matters of faith 
and practice, except so far as any given revela- 


The Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures 39 

tion may be manifestly partial, provisional and 
limited in its time and conditions, or may be after- 
wards modified or superseded by a higher and ful- 
ler revelation adapted to an advanced period in 
the redemption progress to which all revelation 
relates as its final end and glorious consumma- 
tion. 

“Inspiration is an influence within the soul, di- 
vine and supernatural, working through all the 
writers in one organized method, making of the 
many one, by all one book, the book of God, the 
book for man, divine and human in all its parts; 
having the same relation to all other books that 
the person of God has to all other men, that the 
church of the living God has to all other insti- 
tutions.” 


Ill 


THE CROWNING JEWEL OF 
LITERATURE 

The Gospel of John has been pronounced “The 
most original, the most impprtant, the most influ- 
ential book in all literature.” Some of the great- 
est minds of Christendom, — Origen, the greatest 
Biblical exegete, Chrysostom, the most eloquent 
of the Greek Fathers, Jerome, the most scholarly, 
and Augustine the most influential of the Latin 
Fathers, Luther and Calvin, the most eminent of 
the Reformers, have all expressed themselves in 
the strongest terms of its matchless beauty and 
priceless worth. 

We read a book with more interest when we 
know the life of the author. John was the son 
of Zebedee and Salome, probably their youngest 
son, and the brother of James, the first member of 
the Apostolic band to suffer martyrdom. Little 
is known of his father Zebedee, beyond the fact 
that he was a Galilean fisherman, who resided in 
the city of Bethsaida and was sufficiently pros- 
perous to have hired servants to aid him in his 
business. He was so far in sympathy with the 
40 


The Crowning Jewel of Literature 41 

religious movement of the time as to offer no ob- 
jections to his sons giving up their business and 
becoming peripatetic disciples of Jesus. Salome, 
John’s mother, was a woman of deep religious 
convictions, a devoted follower of Jesus who con- 
tributed of her means for his support and one of 
the women who carried spices to his tomb. That 
she was not without ambition is seen in the nature 
of her request that her two sons might occupy 
positions of conspicuity in the Kingdom of Christ, 
one on the right hand and the other on the left 
hand. She is generally regarded as the sister of 
Mary, the mother of Jesus, thus making Jesus 
and John cousins. John was probably some ten 
years younger than Jesus. He first comes into 
notice as a scholar in the preparatory school of 
John the Baptist. But he was among the first 
to become a disciple of Jesus, not only a member 
of the Apostolic band, but also one of the favored 
three, and the most beloved of them all. He with 
his brother James and Peter alone witnessed the 
scene on the Mount of Transfiguration, that 
scene of highest exaltation in the life of our Lord; 
and also the scene of Gethsemane, that scene of 
deepest agony. He leaned on the breast of 
Jesus at the last supper, followed him to the 
court of Caiaphas, and was the only one of the 
Apostles present at the cross. He was the first 
of the Apostles on the morning of the resurrection 


42 The World’s Greatest Classic 

to visit the empty tomb, having outrun Peter. 
Thus we see that he sustained the most intimate 
relation to Jesus during His entire public minis- 
try. 

In the Acts, John takes a minor part compared 
with Peter and Paul. He seems to have left 
Jerusalem sometime after the year 50. After the 
martyrdom of Paul, Ephesus became the scene 
and center of his labors. He was banished for 
a time to the barren rocky little isle of Patmos in 
the iEgean sea, and while there received those 
wondrous visions which he has embodied in the 
Apocalypse. According to the unanimous testi- 
mony of antiquity, he returned after his banish- 
ment to Ephesus, then “a center of Grecian cul- 
ture, commerce, and religion” and there at an ad- 
vanced old age died about the close of the first 
century, the precise year not being known. 

Probably the character of no one of the great 
personages of the Bible has been more often mis- 
conceived or more frequently incorrectly por- 
trayed than the “beloved disciple.” He has been 
too often regarded as a soft, tender almost femi- 
ninely affectionate spirit, lacking masculine 
strength and positiveness. To see how wide this 
view is of the truth, we have only to recall the title 
which Jesus gave John and his brother before their 
spirits were tamed, — “Boanerges,” “Sons of 
thunder” ; or his almost savage anger at a Samari- 


The Crowning Jewel of Literature 43 

tan village for refusing to receive his Master, and 
his desire like Elijah to call down fire from heaven 
to consume it; or the fact that he of all the apos- 
tles was the only one who dared to go to the 
cross. We have only to turn to his writings, 
whether in the Apocalypse “where the thunder 
rolls mighty against the enemies of Christ and 
His Kingdom,” or to his epistle where he hurls 
terrible anathemas against the false teachers of 
his day, to see that he was virile and stern when 
occasion requires as well as tender and loving. 
In his character we have masculine strength and 
an ardent temperament united to womanly purity, 
susceptibility and tenderness, all refined, en- 
nobled and consecrated by divine grace. 

What is the object and design of this gospel? 
We have four biographies of Jesus. When we 
come to study their several contents, we find that 
each one of the four evangelists had a specific ob- 
ject in writing his history and that that object 
determined the selection of the material he used. 
Matthew, the Jew, wrote, as internal and exter- 
nal evidences combine to show, chiefly for the 
Jews, the converted and dispersed people of his 
nation, and for those whose minds were open to 
conviction. As a consequence, we find that he 
traces the genealogy of Jesus back to Abraham, 
the founder of the Jewish nation, and sets him 
forth as the fulfiller of the Old Testament. His 


44 The JVorld’s Greatest Classic 

aim is to show by parable and miracle, by the life 
and sufferings of this Divine Person that He 
meets, matches and fulfills all the prophecies re- 
garding the Messiah. Mark has evidently writ- 
ten for another class of people, and so he makes 
no mention of the genealogy of Jesus at all. He 
wrote for the Roman, a lordly and conquering 
people, who judged character by its achievements. 
Consequently, we find that Mark begins his his- 
tory with the wonderful historic career of Jesus, 
sets Him forth graphically in his pages as the 
Son of God, anointed by the Holy Ghost, clothed 
with almighty power, the Great Wonder Worker 
under whose control and command were the in- 
visible powers and forces of the universe. Luke, 
a man of Greek descent and Greek culture, wrote 
for the Greek converts. He therefore carries 
back the genealogy of Jesus, not to Abraham the 
founder of the Jewish nation as Matthew does, 
but to Adam the first man. In the Gospel of 
Luke, Jesus is set forth by parable and miracle, 
in his compassion and prayers, as the Son of 
Man, universal in His sympathies. 

When we take up the Gospel of John and read 
it as a biography, the first thing that strikes us, 
whether we compare it with other gospels or with 
the requirements of a complete biography, is its 
omissions. There is not a word said in this gos- 
pel of the birth of Jesus, or His baptism, or of 


The Crowning Jewel of Literature 45 

His transfiguration. No mention is made of His 
Sermon on the Mount, or of that prayer taught 
the disciples which we have all learned in infancy. 
John does not record a single one of those match- 
less parables which sparkle and shine like jewels 
on the pages of the other gospels, nor does he re- 
cord a single miracle of our Lord having cured 
one possessed with a demon. When we turn from 
the omissions to what is peculiar to this gospel, 
we find that it is strikingly differentiated from the 
other gospels. Matthew traces the genealogy of 
Jesus back to Abraham, and Luke to Adam. 
Moses begins his record with the beginning of 
creation. But John sweeps back far beyond them 
all, back into the depths of the unmeasured eter- 
nities and declares that “In the beginning was 
the Word and the Word was with God and the 
Word was God. All things were made by Him.” 
There are only eight miracles recorded in this 
entire gospel. Six of these miracles are pecu- 
liar to John. Take these six miracles, — the turn- 
ing of water into wine; the curing of the impo- 
tent man at the pool of Bethesda; the healing of 
the nobleman’s son; the restoring sight to the 
blind man; the raising of Lazarus from the dead; 
and the great draught of fishes, miracles which 
John alone records, — and examine them and you 
will find that they exhibit a higher manifestation 
of power than the miracles recorded in the other 


4 6 The World’s Greatest Classic 

gospels. In the case of water turned into wine, 
we have the very nature of the substance with 
which he started changed into another substance 
without a word being spoken. In the case of the 
nobleman’s son, the youth was healed at a dis- 
tance, without Jesus having seen him at all. In 
the case of the blind man, the power of vision 
was bestowed upon one who had been born blind! 
Lazarus was raised out of the grave after he had 
been there long enough for decomposition to have 
begun its work. 

The Gospel of John is largely made up of the 
conversations, discourses and words of Jesus, al- 
most an autobiography of God in the flesh. If 
John does not give us the Sermon on the Mount, 
he alone gives us the interview of Jesus with Nico- 
demus which is the gospel in miniature, and his 
conversation with the woman of Samaria. He 
also gives us His farewell address to His dis- 
ciples which, in its sublimity and thrilling gran- 
deur, stands matchless and alone in the whole 
realm of literature. If he does not report the 
prayer Jesus taught His disciples, he alone re- 
ports that prayer offered the night before His 
crucifixion in which the Eternal Son of God opens 
His heart to the invisible Father and carries us 
into the very holy of holies. John tells us him- 
self why he wrote this gospel. He did not under- 
take to give a full and complete history of the 


The Crowning Jewel of Literature 47 

life and deeds of Jesus. There were many things 
which He did in the presence of His disciples 
which are not written in this book. But what he 
wrote was written that “ye may believe that Jesus 
is Christ, the Son of God; and that believing, ye 
may have life in His name.” John wrote not dis- 
tinctly for the Jew or the Roman or the Greek, 
but for the converts of all nations, for Christians 
who had multiplied greatly during the last quar- 
ter of the first century. 

Where and when was this gospel written? 
There are internal evidences that this gospel was 
written after the destruction of Jerusalem, which 
took place in the year 70, and by one who was 
familiar with the topography of Jerusalem, the 
localities of Palestine, and the customs of the 
Jews. Take such statements as “Bethany was 
nigh unto Jerusalem about fifteen furlongs off”; 
“He went forth over the brook of Kedron where 
was a garden”; “In the place where he was cruci- 
fied there was a garden.” No doubt after the 
destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, many 
of these gardens were obliterated and the general 
aspect of the surrounding localities changed, for 
Titus cut down all the trees to make crosses to 
crucify the Jews. John, therefore, speaks of 
these places not as they were at the time when he 
wrote, but as they had been in the lifetime of 
Christ. Then he explains Jewish customs, as 


48 The World’s Greatest Classic 

when he speaks at the marriage of Cana, of the 
water-pot being placed there “after the manner of 
the purifying of the Jews.” There is no ground 
for questioning the generally accepted opinion that 
John wrote his gospel in the city of Ephesus, 
sometime during the last ten years of the first 
century. 

Go back in imagination to the time of John, 
and glance for a moment in thought at one fea- 
ture in his special preparation for writing this 
crowning work of Revelation. Mary, the mother 
of Jesus, after the crucifixion, by the request of 
Jesus Himself, made her home with John. How 
often must He, who filled so large a place in the 
lives and thoughts of these two, have been the 
subject of their conversation! How much John 
must have learned from her concerning things 
which she had hid away in her heart and none 
knew but her, and which flashed additional light 
on what he knew! It is easy to picture to our- 
selves Mary and John sitting night after night 
talking over the past, he listening with tear- 
stained face as she described events, narrated in- 
cidents, repeated sayings which through a period 
of thirty years occurred in the privacy of the 
home. May not some of the tender charm of this 
gospel be due to the fact that through it a 
mother’s heart speaks? It was after fifty years of 
meditation, when the other gospels had for years 


The Crowning Jewel of Literature 49 

been in circulation, twenty or twenty-five years 
after all the other apostles were dead that John, 
in the mellow ripeness of old age but with intel- 
lectual powers unimpaired, under the illuminat- 
ing influence of the Holy Spirit, wrote this Gos- 
pel. 

Glance at an outline of the structure of this 
book. Without attempting any analysis of its 
contents, it may be said in passing that this gos- 
pel is divided into five parts. The first part is 
the introduction, and includes the first eighteen 
verses of the first chapter. In this introduction, 
Jesus is set forth as eternal in His existence, di- 
vine in His nature, the Creator of all things, and 
the revealer of God to man. The second part ex- 
tends to the close of the twelfth chapter. It is 
the self-manifestation of Jesus Christ as the In- 
carnate Word in His life, teachings, and works, 
to the Jews, the Samaritans, and the Gentiles. 
John alone records the visit of the Greeks to Him 
on the last day of public ministry in the temple. 
The third part extends from the end of the 
twelfth chapter to the end of the seventeenth 
chapter, and embraces the closing interview of 
Jesus with His disciples, His farewell discourse 
and sacerdotal prayer. The fourth part includes 
the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth chapters, 
and contains an account of His betrayal, arrest, 
trial, condemnation, crucifixion and resurrection. 


50 The World’s Greatest Classic 

The fifth part is the epilogue and consists of the 
closing chapter. It contains His interview with 
His disciples on the lake shore subsequent to His 
resurrection, and His memorable conversation 
with Peter. This gospel of twenty-one chapters 
can be read with thoughtful deliberation in less 
than three hours. 

This gospel which Wescott calls “the Divine 
Hebrew Epic” is preeminently and emphatically 
the Gospel of the Incarnation, that is of the per- 
fect union of the human and the divine in the 
person of Jesus of Nazareth. The theme is that 
“the Word was God,” and that “the Word be- 
came flesh” and dwelt in the midst of men. John 
begins his gospel with the preexistence of Jesus, 
“in the beginning” before creation or time “was 
the Word”; and he ends it with the adoration of 
this incarnate divine person, in the exclamation 
of the convinced Thomas “My Lord and my 
God.” 

In the Gospel of Matthew, Mark and Luke, we 
have the history of a divine man. In the Gos- 
pel of John, we have the history of a human God. 
“I and my Father are one.” “He that hath 
seen me hath seen my Father.” “O Father, 
glorify thou me with thine own self, with the 
glory which I had with thee before the world 
was.” It is the Gospel of love. It is in the fourth 
gospel alone we read that precious declaration 


The Crowning Jewel of Literature 51 

which contains the essence of Christianity, “God 
so loved the word that He gave His only begotten 
Son that whosoever believeth on Him should not 
perish but have everlasting life.” In its pages, 
God is set forth as love, giving in the Incarnation 
and historic mission of His Son, the greatest pos- 
sible proof of His love for mankind. It is the 
gospel which contains the new commandment, 
“Love one another.” 


IV 


CREEDAL SAFETY 

There is a class of persons whose intellectual 
ability and moral honesty no fair-minded man 
can doubt, who repudiate the Bible as an infallible 
guide and regard the Christian religion as having 
largely originated in the ignorance and credulity 
of well-meaning enthusiasts who were prone to 
attribute natural events to supernatural causes. 
The ability and earnestness with which they assail 
the Christian religion often raise doubts in the 
mind of some as to whether after all the sublime 
certitudes and infinite realities of the gospel may 
not be a delusion. I desire to show that the faith 
of the Christian involves no peril even were the 
teachings of infidelity true. Let the assumptions, 
probabilities and evidences in favor of the truth 
of the creed of the Christian and of the creed of 
the skeptic be equally balanced, still the Christian 
by holding on to his creed perils no interest either 
for time or for eternity, while the skeptic risks 
the tremendous interests of eternity on a possi- 
bility. 

Does a belief in the truths of Christianity in- 
52 


53 


Creedal Safety 

volve any peril even if the teachings of skepti- 
cism were true? The fundamental doctrine of 
the Christian religion is a belief in the existence 
of an eternally self-existent God who is the Crea- 
tor and Preserver of all things. Suppose that the 
belief of the atheist should prove true that there 
is no God, that matter is self-existent and eternal, 
and that everything, mind inclusive, is the prod- 
uct of those forces which are latent in and lie 
behind matter, is there any assignable or con- 
ceivable reason why he who believes in God is 
not as safe as he who believes that there is no 
God? If there is no Supreme Being to call man 
to an account for his actions, still the position of 
the theist is as safe as the position of the atheist 
But all skeptics, even those who most strenuously 
insist on legislating God out of existence by the 
very laws which he Himself has inaugurated, ad- 
mit that man is a religious animal and will have 
some object of worship. This is true of man in 
all ages and in all parts of the world. Now who 
is likely to live the most upright life and be the 
happiest man, he who believes in a just, holy, all- 
powerful Creator who loves him, cares for him, 
takes cognizance of his thoughts and actions, or 
the man who recognizes no higher being in the 
Universe than himself? Considered from the 
standpoint of the atheist, no conceivable harm 
can come from believing that the universe, which, 


54 The World’s Greatest Classic 

whether looked up at through the telescope, or 
down at through the microscope, reveals such mar- 
vels of power, skill and design, is the work of an 
infinitely wise and Almighty God. 

Another cardinal doctrine of Christianity is the 
immortality of the soul. Suppose the creed of the 
infidel that man at death instead of passing into 
a new state of conscious activity sinks into ever- 
lasting nothingness should prove true, still the be- 
lief of the Christian is as safe as the belief of the 
skeptic. Is there anything in the belief on the 
part of man that he is immortal, or that the char- 
acter of his existence beyond the grave is deter- 
mined by the character of his conduct in this 
world which has a tendency to make him untruth- 
ful, dishonest, immoral? On the contrary, does 
not the belief that this life “is only the infancy of 
an eternal manhood in the life which is to come” 
— the seed-time, of which eternity will be the har- 
vest, exert a salutary influence upon human con- 
duct? Then the Christian runs no risk and perils 
no interest by believing in the immortality of the 
soul. If the speculative opinions of infidelity 
should prove true and the hope of immortality 
turn out to be a delusion, the Christian is as well 
off as the skeptic. Annihilation awaits them both 
alike. 

Another basic doctrine of Christianity is a be- 
lief in the guilt and ruin of man by sin. The 


55 


Creedal Safety 

existence of evil is a tremendous and terrific real- 
ity which no one questions. Can any evil result 
from believing that sin which gives to the lower 
elements of our nature the ascendancy degrades 
man, deprives him of the friendship of God and 
exposes him to His wrath? What interest does 
such a belief peril? 

The sufficiency of the atonement that the Lord 
Jesus Christ made upon the cross for human guilt 
is an essential article of Christian faith. Suppose 
the theories of infidelity which deny His Divinity 
laugh to scorn His miracles and pronounce the 
story of His resurrection a myth, should be true, 
is the man who trusts in Him for salvation in any 
more dangerous position than the man who re- 
jects Him? Does the belief that the eternal Son 
of God appeared on this earth in the form of man, 
that He stepped between us and offended justice 
and bore its penalty for our sakes, that He rose 
from the dead and passed into the heavens where 
He intercedes for us, tend to make men miserable? 
Does it produce unhappiness in the human breast? 
Does it make men less self-sacrificing, less solici- 
tous for the welfare of their fellow men, less 
heroic in duty? I point to the testimony of tens 
of thousands in the most testing and trying cir- 
cumstances of life, in sickness, sorrow, bereave- 
ment, aye in the solemn and awful hour of death 
for an answer. I point to the sublime conduct of 


56 The World’s Greatest Classic 

thousands of men and women who have volun- 
tarily left home, kin and country, who have turned 
their backs upon civilization, social refinement and 
personal comfort and gone forth to face vice in 
its most repulsive forms, to battle with malaria, 
fever and death in order to carry the light and 
knowledge of the saving power of the gospel 
into the dark places of the earth for an answer. 

The Christian believes that God has appointed 
a day when He will judge the world in right- 
eousness by the man Christ Jesus. Every man 
will be judged according to the light he possessed 
and the privileges that he enjoyed and be re- 
warded according to the measure of his fidelity, or 
punished according to his misdeeds. These truths 
which are in harmony with the dictates of reason 
he believes because they are unequivocally taught 
in the Scriptures. Is any good citizen rendered 
less conscientious or less upright in conduct by 
the belief that he stands responsible to the laws 
of the commonwealth in which he lives for his 
actions and that these laws protect innocence and 
punish crime? Does not the belief that the pen- 
alties which the law has affixed against crime will 
be enforced, restrain vice and exert a wholesome 
influence on society? Suppose the position of the 
skeptic that there will be no final judgment, no 
future scenes of rewards and punishments should 
be true, is it not safe for man to believe in them? 


57 


Creedal Safety 

Does his belief that he is responsible for his con- 
duct to God interfere with his usefulness in this 
world, or render him less worthy of the respect 
and confidence of his fellowmen? Who is most 
likely to appreciate the importance of truthful- 
ness, honesty and purity most highly in this life, 
the man who believes that God’s eye is upon him 
and that for all his wicked motives and evil 
deeds he will be called to an account, or the man 
who believes he can act with impunity as he 
pleases? If there is no heaven and no hell, still 
the position of the Christian is as safe as the 
position of the infidel. The Christian would 
gain nothing which would contribute to his per- 
sonal happiness, or furnish him with grander 
conceptions of life and render him more helpful 
to his fellow men by surrendering his belief in 
the great doctrine of the Bible, but on the con- 
trary lose much. 

As there are certain things which it is safe 
to believe so there are certain things which it is 
safe to do. Repentance is a duty taught in the 
Bible. But what is repentance? It involves sor- 
row for our sins of commission and omission, an 
abandonment of those things which are displeas- 
ing to God, and obedience to His commands. If 
a man by word or deed wrongs another the dic- 
tates of a noble nature require that he express 
his sorrow and if possible make adequate repara- 


58 The World's Greatest Classic 

tion. There can be no conceivable harm in the 
Christian feeling sorry for the wrong he has done 
and avoiding wrong-doing in the future even if 
the skeptic’s theory of the universe and of man 
be true. Is it not safe for the Christian to gov- 
ern his life by the ethics of the Bible and practice 
the morality it enjoins? Is it injurious to the 
individual, or hurtful to society to obey the ten 
commandents, to keep the Sabbath day holy, to 
honor our parents, to regard human life as sacred, 
to crucify lust, to be honest, truthful, unselfish 
— duties enjoined in that incomparable code? 
Would a compliance on the part of all men with 
those golden rules laid down by the Savior: 
“Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” and 
“Whatsoever ye would that men should do to 
you, do even so to them,” be injurious to society? 
The superiority of the ethics of the Bible to all 
other ethical systems is as evident on examina- 
tion as that goodness tends to produce happiness 
and vice misery. 

The duty which God requires of man is con- 
cretely set forth in the life of our blessed Lord. 
The whole duty of man is briefly summed up in 
His own words: “Follow thou Me.” Do the 
records of the ages present a model so grand as 
is held up for our imitation in the example of our 
Lord? It would be easy to summon celebrated 
infidels, such men as Strauss, Renan and Mill to 


Creedal Safety 59 

bear testimony to the incomparable greatness of 
the character of Jesus. These men have ex- 
hausted their respective languages for adjectives, 
to express their lofty conceptions of the peerless 
grandeur of His character and life. “He remains,” 
says Strauss, “the highest model of religion within 
the reach of our thought and no perfect piety is 
possible without his presence in the heart.” “A 
thousand times more alive,” says Renan, “a thou- 
sand times more beloved since thy death than dur- 
ing the passage here below, thou shalt become the 
corner-stone of humanity so entirely that to tear 
thy name from this world would be to rend it 
to its foundations. Between thee and God there 
will be no longer any distinction. Whatever may 
be the surprises of the future, Jesus will never be 
surpassed.” “About the sayings of Jesus,” says 
Mill, “there is a stamp of originality combined 
with profundity of insight which must place the 
Prophet of Nazareth even in the estimation of 
those who have no belief in his inspiration in 
the very first rank of the men of sublime genius 
of whom our species can boast. When this pre- 
eminent genius is combined with qualities of prob- 
ably the greatest moral reformer, and martyr to 
that mission, who ever existed upon earth ; religion 
cannot be said to have made a bad choice in pitch- 
ing on this man as the ideal representative and 
guide of humanity; nor even now would it be easy, 


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The World's Greatest Classic 


even for an unbeliever to find a better translation 
of the rule of virtue from the abstract into the 
concrete than to endeavor so to live that Christ 
would approve our life.” Then according to the 
testimony of these celebrated infidels, it is by trans- 
muting the precepts of Jesus into life, by imitating 
the example which He Himself has set that we 
attain to the highest standard of moral manhood. 

But I advance a step farther and affirm the pos- 
sibility of the truth of the Bible and of every doc- 
trine which it teaches. The skeptic cannot prove 
that there is no God. Look at the qualifications 
necessary to establish the truth of atheism. Sup- 
pose that it is impossible to discover any proof or 
trace of a Being with the essence and Sovereignty 
of God in that part of creation explored by man, 
does it therefore follow that there is no God? 
Is not the universe illimitable? Is not that por- 
tion of it which falls within the range of our 
vision, even when aided by the most powerful 
inventions of genius insignificant compared with 
the unknown vastness which lies beyond? Before 
we can say there is no God, “we should need to 
travel abroad, over the surrounding universe till 
we had exhausted it and then to search backward 
through all the hidden recesses of eternity; to 
traverse in every direction the plains of infinitude 
and sweep the outskirts of that space which is it- 
self interminable and then bring back to this 


Creedal Safety 61 

world of ours the report of a universe blank, 
wherein we had not met with one manifestation 
or movement of a presiding God.” For a man to 
be competent to declare atheism to be true he 
must possess the attribute of omniscience. As 
atheists lay no claim to such an endowment, then 
their creed is an assertion incapable of proof. If 
I am shut up to the necessity of a choice between 
assertions, then I prefer to accept the statements 
of the Bible. Neither can the skeptic prove that 
the soul is not immortal, nor that there is no 
judgment and no heaven and no hell. If the 
skeptic cannot prove the truth of his position, then 
there is a possibility that everything taught in 
the Word of God is true. Even in the face of the 
possibility of this fact, what fearful and eternal 
risks does the skeptic run! 

But I advance a step farther and affirm that the 
evidence of the truth of all the claims which the 
Bible puts forth is overwhelming and would sat- 
isfy all men in regard to another subject. While 
the Bible reveals truths which transcend the power 
of the human mind to discover, it teaches nothing 
that does not commend itself to enlightened rea- 
son. It has been assailed on every side by bitter 
and able foes, but every attack has resulted in a 
more complete vindication of its truth. Science 
after science has confronted it with immature in- 
ductions and charged it with teaching things con- 


6 2 


The World’s Greatest Classic 


tradictory to the facts of nature. But a wider 
induction of facts and a more perfect knowl- 
edge of the forces which lie behind phenomena 
have ultimately brought these sciences into har- 
mony with its utterances. Do men act wisely 
when either on account of the fathomless mysteries 
of the Christian religion, or intellectual difficulties, 
they risk the interests of that eternity unveiled in 
the Bible on a perhaps? “I speak as unto wise 
men; judge ye what I say.” 


V 


THE INCOMPARABLE TEACHER 

Jesus of Nazareth stands before the world to- 
day as the greatest and most overmastering per- 
sonage of human history. In an age like ours 
when so many things are challenged, an age more 
noted for its destructive criticisms than its great 
creations, it is of immense advantage to have 
something on which there is general agreement. 
Jews who deny the claims of Jesus, infidels who 
repudiate the Bible, and atheists who impugn the 
existence of God, are all wont now to speak 
respectfully of Him as the greatest moral and re- 
ligious teacher the world has ever seen. “It is,” 
says Huxley, “a commendable practice to preface 
the discussion of the views of a philosophic 
thinker by some account of the man and of the 
circumstances which shaped his life and colored 
his way of looking at things.” 

How much we should all like to know just how 
this greatest of teachers looked to the people of 
His own day when He mingled in their midst, 
preached in their synagogues, performed His 
63 


6 4 The World's Greatest Classic 

mighty works and taught those truths to which the 
ages, listen with increasing interest. 

We are able from statues and coins to form 
some idea, more or less accurate, of the features 
and appearance of the greatest men of Greece and 
Rome, but no portrait exists of Jesus which is 
not centuries later than His time. There are, 
however, some things which we can gather from 
the statements and hints of the gospels, which en- 
able us to form a pretty accurate idea of His 
external condition. We know that He grew up 
to manhood in an obscure village, the violent char- 
acter of whose inhabitants had gained for it an 
unsavory reputation in the surrounding region. 
That the character of these villagers justified the 
bad opinion their neighbors had of them, is evi- 
dent from the fact that they once sought to kill 
Him. He learned the trade of a carpenter and 
wrought in the village at wood-work. Justin 
Martyr, who lived less than a century after His 
time, tells us that He made plows and ox-yokes. 
During the period of His public ministry He had 
no home but was supported by the hospitality of 
friends and the gifts of generous women. He 
traveled from place to place, publicly teaching 
the people who came to hear Him and privately 
instructing His chosen disciples so that they might 
be qualified to carry out His work after His de- 
parture out of this world. He assumed no dis- 


The Incomparable Teacher 65 

tinctive garb like some of the prophets, or like 
His great forerunner, John the Baptist, or like 
the contemporary religious teachers of His na- 
tion. He attended wedding feasts, accepted in- 
vitations to the houses of the wealthy when in- 
vited, reclined with them on luxurious couches at 
meals, ate and drank what was served on such oc- 
casions, even though it exposed Him to miscon- 
ception and to the charge, as compared with His 
ascetic herald prophet, of being a glutton and a 
winebibber. These are some of the things in His 
outward and visible life with which the gospels 
make us familiar. 

There are certain things which they make clear 
respecting His personal life. He was a man of 
prayer. At every critical period in His ministry, 
He was wont to spend long seasons in prayer. The 
night preceding the selection of His twelve dis- 
ciples was passed in prayer. When the enthusi- 
astic multitude was so stirred by His creative act 
of multiplying the loaves before their eyes that 
they desired to make Him king, He dismissed 
them and retired alone to pray. His transfigura- 
tion on a spur of Hermon took place when He 
was engaged in prayer. He agonized in prayer 
in Gethsemane, flinging Himself on the dewy 
ground, thrice uttering the same words. His last 
words on the cross were a prayer. 

The gospels show that He possessed a thor- 


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The World's Greatest Classic 


ough knowledge of the ancient Scriptures and a 
marvelous insight into their meaning. Remem- 
ber that He passed out of this world at the early 
age of three and thirty. Of course, it would be 
easy for us to mention the names of men whose 
deeds are emblazoned on the pages of history 
who had finished their life work, gained for them- 
selves that immortality which the breath of man 
can bestow, and were in their graves before they 
had fairly crossed the threshold of mature man- 
hood. Such men as Alexander the Great, Raph- 
ael, Burns, Mozart, had made their contribution 
to the grand totalities of history and passed off 
the stage of action at a period of life when many 
men of great intellects, who have left their im- 
press upon their age, had scarcely started in their 
career. 

He was also a workingman. It is possible for 
some men to accomplish vast results with appar- 
ent little opportunity. Elihu Burritt, mastered 
many languages while working at his anvil as a 
blacksmith fourteen hours a day. It may be. that 
Jesus pored over the scroll of sacred writings as 
He worked at His bench over a plow or ox-yoke. 
There is one thing evident that He easily con- 
founded His opponents, who were accomplished 
dialecticians, out of the Scriptures. He studied 
them for His own edification and cited them for 
His own comfort. Three times He responded 


The Incomparable Teacher 67 

to the tempter in the wilderness, saying: “It is 
written,” each time quoting from the book of 
Deuteronomy. Of His seven utterances on the 
cross, three are taken from the Psalms, showing 
how familiar He was with them as suitable ve- 
hicles to express the deepest emotions of His soul. 
Subsequent to His resurrection, He explained to 
two of His disciples in the journey to Emmaus 
the riddle of His life, by unfolding to them the 
Scriptures bearing on this point. 

Jesus was a habitual attendant at public wor- 
ship. At the age of twelve He went to Jeru- 
salem to attend the great religious feast. The 
probabilities are that He repeated that journey 
each year until He began His public ministry. It 
was His custom to attend the synagogue, even 
though there may have been much in the for- 
malism of the service and in the false exposition 
of the Scriptures that jarred upon His holy and 
sensitive spirit. 

He sustained intimate relations with some 
chosen friends outside of the apostolic band. He 
loved one family very dearly and was so touched 
at the grief of the two sisters of this household 
over the death of their brother, that He wept 
with them at the very moment that He raised him 
from the grave. 

Ordinarily He sat when He taught. When 
compelled to step on board a boat so that He 


68 The World’s Greatest Classic 

might more conveniently address the great multi- 
tude that gathered on the pebbly beach of Lake 
Galilee, He sat. When He delivered His great 
Sermon on the Mount, He sat on the grassy hill- 
side. When He taught in the synagogues, He 
sat. Occasionally when stirred by profound emo- 
tion, He stood, as when in the temple He stood 
and cried: “If any man thirst, let him come unto 
Me and drink.” 

There was a combination of graciousness and 
severity about His manner, which led the people 
sometimes to think that He was Jeremiah, and 
at other times that He was the stern Elijah. How 
gracious were His words to the trembling woman 
who sought to be healed of her disease by secretly 
touching His clothes: “Daughter, be of good 
comfort, thy faith hath made thee whole; go in 
peace.” How sweet and tender were His words 
to the saddened disciples on the eve of His de- 
parture from them: “Let not your heart be 
troubled; ye believe in God, believe also in Me.” 
How severe was His reproof to Peter when He 
sternly said: “Get thee behind me, Satan; thou 
art a stumblingblock unto Me.” How terrific 
was His denunciation of the Scribes and Pharisees 
when He exclaimed: “Ye serpents, ye off-spring 
of vipers, how shall ye escape the damnation of 
hell.” 

There was a strange majesty, an imperial au- 


The Incomparable Teacher 69 

thority about His manner of teaching which no 
other man of all history, be he heathen philoso- 
pher, or inspired prophet, or modern savant, ever 
dared to assume, knowing that it would bring 
upon him the withering scorn of his fellow beings. 
How kingly, authoritative, and indicative of abso- 
lute knowledge are such declarations as “I am the 
light of the world” — “I am the bread of life” — 
“I am the resurrection and the life.” 

Passing from His personal character and man- 
ner of teaching, look at some truths which He 
taught. When He announced Himself as a Di- 
vine Teacher who had come from God to set up 
a new kingdom among men, it was necessary for 
Him to define the relation which He sustained to 
the existing religion of His nation. This neces- 
sity grew out of the fact that the Jews were in 
possession of a definite and venerable code of 
laws and a minute and elaborate ritualism of sac- 
rifice and praise, which they had received from 
God through the hands of Moses, This code as 
expounded by prophets from Moses to Malachi, 
was the highest expression of the will of God for 
the regulation of human conduct which they knew. 
But it was rumored soon after Jesus began His 
ministry, and some of His acts and utterances 
seemed to furnish grounds for this rumor, that 
His teachings were revolutionary and destructive 
and tended to undermine and overthrow the whole 


70 The World’s Greatest Classic 

superstructure of Mosaism. His audiences were 
composed of two classes who listened to Him 
with diametrically opposite feelings. One class 
was composed of the mass of the people, to whom 
the multitude of ceremonies for the proper ob- 
servance of their religious duties had become 
burdensome beyond endurance. They listened 
to Him with delight because they thought that 
He was about to relax the old law. The other 
class was chiefly composed of professional teach- 
ers, whose power and influence were the result 
of their punctilious observance of those services. 
As they resisted any violation of them as sacrilege, 
they listened to Him with feelings of suspicion 
and alarm. To correct the misapprehensions of 
both these classes, Jesus clearly defined the rela- 
tion which He sustained to the existing body of 
revelation. On the one hand He had not come 
to abrogate the law, or erect a lower ethical 
standard than that of the God sent men who had 
preceded Him. 

On the other hand, He had not come to sanc- 
tion that inflexible, unprogressive conservatism, 
whose idolatry of the past is so great, that it 
arrests all development, and refuses to fulfill the 
spirit of existing systems by a wise superseding of 
their forms. Jesus was neither an extreme radi- 
cal who would tear Himself loose from all con- 


The Incomparable Teacher 71 

nection with the past, nor a rigid conservatist who 
refused to develop the spirit of the past, and 
embody it in a new form. He had come to ful- 
fill the true spirit of Judaism; but this very ful- 
fillment would involve the abrogation of its ex- 
ternal form and the substitution of a new form 
in its place. “Think not that I am come to de- 
stroy the law and the prophets” — the law and the 
prophets being at that time a literary phrase used 
to designate the whole body of sacred writings. 
“I am not come to destroy but to fulfill.” 

The Mosaic law was a vast and complex code 
adapted for a people who were chosen at a par- 
ticular time and for a special purpose. Its pur- 
pose was twofold. First it was designed to meet 
the immediate wants of a people who were in a 
rudimentary state of civilization whom God was 
gradually educating up to a more perfect knowl- 
edge of the right, and consequently, it exhibits 
the limitations and imperfections inevitable to such 
a condition of things. In the second place it 
transmitted permanent principles and foreshad- 
owed truths which were to be realized and devel- 
oped in the distant future. The Mosaic law held 
in perishable forms the germ of the perfect law 
of ethics revealed in the New Testament. Jesus 
began His work as Fulfiller of the law and the 
prophets by sweeping away the glosses and per- 


72 The World’s Greatest Classic 

versions which rabbinical teachings had heaped 
upon them and showing that His kingdom was 
based on principles latent in the Hebrew religion. 

Look at some aspects of the ethical teachings 
of Jesus as found in His Sermon on the Mount. 
One of the saddest facts of history is that men 
have so often divorced religion and morality. This 
fact has proved the curse of nations and has been 
the source of unspeakable misery to mankind. 
Confucius, who lived in the sixth century before 
the Christian era and who to-day numbers among 
his followers nearly one-third of the human race, 
taught a system of natural morality from which 
the ideas of a personal God and a future life was 
excluded. Greeks and Romans went to the other 
extreme and taught religion without morality, 
even going so far as to make bad men objects of 
worship, and licentiousness a form of religion. 

The Jewish contemporaries of Jesus in their 
traditional teachings also taught religion without 
morality. A man might refuse food to his father 
and mother, or the money necessary for their sup- 
port, by saying that that particular food or that 
money was Corban, that is, a thing offered to 
God, and his act was approved as pious. Jesus 
cites such conduct and then severely rebukes them 
for imagining that such a supposed religious act 
could be acceptable to God when it broke His 
express command to honor father and mother and 


The Incomparable Teacher 73 

made void His word. He pronounced woes on 
the Pharisees for scrupulously tithing their pos- 
sessions down to the least important vegetables 
in their garden — cummin and anise, but leaving 
undone such matters of the law as justice, mercy 
and faith. The tithing they ought to have done, 
but the infinitely more important matters of justice 
and mercy they ought not to have left undone. 
In the teachings of Jesus, religion and ethics, our 
duty to God and our duty to man are inseparably 
united. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with 
all thy soul and with all thy mind. This is the 
great and first commandment. And a second like 
unto it is this, thou shalt love thy neighbor as 
thyself. On these two commandments hang the 
whole law and the prophets.” As Jesus sets 
forth God as a divine Father and men as His sons 
and consequently brothers in His teachings, the 
obligations of ethics are enforced by the higher 
obligations of religion. Take a few of the com- 
mands of Jesus laid down in the Sermon on the 
Mount which have to do with men here and now, 
in the everyday work of this busy world, and ex- 
amine them. I venture to think that some of 
these commands are still misunderstood and mis- 
applied by some intelligent, well meaning and 
good people. 

One difference between Jesus and every other 
great teacher is this : that He reduced to practice 


74 The World's Greatest Classic 

every principle that He laid down for the regu- 
lation and guidance of human conduct. As His 
life was flawless and perfect, a safe way of inter- 
preting the meaning of any command is to com- 
pare it with His own conduct. To His disciples 
He said: “It was said of old time, thou shalt not 
forswear thyself” — that is, swear falsely — “but 
perform unto the Lord thine oaths; but I say 
unto thee swear not at all, but let your speech 
be yea, yea, and nay, nay; and whatsoever is more 
than these is of the evil one.” Many excellent 
people, such as the Quakers, consider this is a uni- 
versal prohibition of all oaths, or any appeal to 
God in attestation of the truth, whether in a court 
of justice or before any legal tribunal. But did 
Jesus mean here to prohibit absolutely and under 
all circumstances the taking of an oath as wrong? 
Turn to His own conduct. Once the high priest 
presiding in the Sanhedrin put Him under oath, 
saying: “I adjure thee by the living God that thou 
tell us whether thou be the Christ the Son of 
God.” For Jesus to answer was to admit the 
rightness of an oath. He answered and answered 
under oath. Interpreting His precept by His ex- 
ample, He teaches that oaths when imposed by 
adequate authority for judicial ends are right. 
Jesus teaches principles which are comprehensible 
and flexible, but never lays down rules. The very 
thinking which is necessary to apply His principles 


The Incomparable Teacher 75 

properly in every day life constitutes a very valu- 
able part of our moral discipline. Many of the 
errors of men in dealing with His ethical teach- 
ings is that they take His principles and attempt 
to lay them down as rules. For example He 
says : “Whosoever smiteth thee on thy right cheek, 
turn to him the other also.” That we have here, 
not as some have supposed, a rule to be literally 
observed, but the striking statement of a principle 
is at once evident when we examine it in the light 
of His own conduct. On the night of His arrest 
when an officer smote Him on the face for some 
supposed discourtesy to the high priest, did He 
turn to him the other cheek? Did He not with 
calm indignation at the gross outrage say: “If I 
have spoken evil, bear witness of the evil, but if 
well, why smitest thou Me?” In like manner He 
said: “Ye have heard that it was said an eye for 
an eye and a tooth for a tooth, but I say unto you 
resist not him that is evil.” The Mosaic law per- 
mitted that a wanton assailant who inflicted an 
injury on the person of another should be pun- 
ished by suffering a hurt similar in kind and equal 
in extent, — an eye for an eye, a hand for a hand. 
This law of retaliation which expresses a rude 
principle of justice, but which tended to generate 
a spirit of revenge, Jesus entirely forbids. So 
great an evil is revenge that it is better to suffer 
injury than to cherish or practice its spirit^ But 


7 6 The World’s Greatest Classic 

some have taken the principle and changed it 
into rules. They consider the resisting of evil 
under any circumstances, or the bearing of arms 
in the defense of principle, the enforcement of 
right, or the maintenance of national honor as a 
wrong contrary to the letter of the teachings of 
Jesus. This is practically what the venerable 
Russian nobleman, Count Tolstoi, teaches. Con- 
verted in the meridian of life with a distinguished 
record as a soldier and an almost world-wide 
reputation as a writer of wonderful imagination 
and great dramatic power, he gave up position 
and fame and retired to his ancestral estate to put 
in practice what he believes the teachings of Jesus 
to be. With all his genius and excellencies, he 
has misapprehended the teachings of Jesus in this 
particular and has converted into rules for life 
what He has taught as principles. 

There are some things in the ethical teachings 
of Jesus which men are too apt simply to admire 
as ideals — splendid to be talked about in the 
pulpit, but utterly impractical in the stern duties 
of everyday life. Take His teaching in regard 
to forgiveness. He puts this duty thus: “If thou 
art offering thy gift at the altar, and there” — 
when standing before the altar — “remember that 
thy brother hath aught against thee, leave there 
thy gift before the altar and go thy way, first be 
reconciled to thy brother and come and offer thy 


The Incomparable Teacher 77 

gift.” Forgiveness and reconciliation with our 
Christian brother must precede acceptable worship 
of God. Peter asks how many times an offender 
should be forgiven — seven times? Peter would 
like some definite rule. Jesus responds by giving 
him a principle — not seven times, but seventy 
times seven. Look at this principle in the light of 
His own conduct on the cross. His prayer for 
His persecutors was: “Father, forgive them for 
they know not what they do.” When men in 
Christian lands cherish unforgiving hatred or seek 
revenge even for great wrongs they know that they 
are acting contrary to the spirit of Christianity. 

What an amazing transformation society would 
undergo if men the world over would reduce to 
practice the teachings of Jesus. 


VI 


THINGS WHICH SPEAK THE PRAISE OF 
GOD’S GLORY 

Some years ago the writer stood on a mountain 
top in Switzerland under a starlit sky, and watched 
with eager delight the sun rise in cloudless glory 
and change night into day. As he slowly emerged 
above the horizon the stars in the east paled and 
vanished, the lofty sun-clad mountain peaks be- 
came visible, while the western heavens still re- 
mained dark and star studded. As he gradu- 
ally rose higher you could see the darkness roll 
up like a scroll and flee before the light, until 
the whole sky was bright with his effulgence. But 
long after the snow crowned mountain tops were 
bathed in light the valleys remained so deeply 
veiled in clouds that it was impossible to see them. 
Gradually as his rays became stronger, the clouds 
melted away and the valleys one after another, 
with their lakes and villages their scenes of hu- 
man industry and rural peacefulness became dis- 
tinctly visible, until from that lofty watch tower 
there stretched away on all sides a magnificent 
panorama of sublimity and beauty. 

78 


Things Which Speak Praise of God’s Glory 79 

It may be both instructive and interesting to 
take our stand on an Alpine height of divine rev- 
elation and look for a little while on some of those 
things which God has made and done “unto the 
praise of His glory.” To ascend out of the 
narrow limits in which human life and duty are 
so often shut in, and where existence is so often 
absorbed in secular prosaic pettiness, to some 
lofty outlook where a majestic vision of truth and 
human possibilities can be seen, imparts that en- 
franchisement to the mind and heart that expands 
and ennobles the whole being. 

Consider the theater in which the Divine activ- 
ity is displayed. “In the beginning God created 
the heavens and the earth.” They were framed 
and fashioned unto the praise of His glory. “The 
heavens declare the glory of God; and the firma- 
ment sheweth His handiwork. Day unto day ut- 
tereth speech and night unto night sheweth knowl- 
edge.” The progress of astronomical science in 
the range of its vision, the accuracy of its knowl- 
edge and the marvels of its achievements give to 
these words now a far grander and more impres- 
sive significance than they could have had for the 
Psalmist. Think of the vastness of the material 
universe, as unveiled by the telescope, and the im- 
mensities of the distances which exist between 
some of the heavenly bodies. 

As figures go but a small way in expressing the 


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amplitudes of space, different sorts of illustrations 
have been resorted to in order to make these dis- 
tances at all intelligible. The mere statement 
that the distance between the earth and the sun is 
92 or 93,000,000 of miles does not convey to our 
minds any clear, definite idea of the vastness of 
that distance. Compare it with railroad travel 
and it would take an express train, running at 
the rate of sixty miles an hour, day and night 
without pause for 174 years to make the journey. 

Pass out into the celestial spaces beyond that 
system of worlds, of which our sun is the center. 
His nearest neighbor sun is 275,000 times 93,- 
000,000 miles away. So enormous is this dis- 
tance that it would take an express train, moving 
at the rate of 60 miles an hour, without pause or 
interruption, nearly forty-eight million years to 
cover the distance. And still we only stand on the 
very threshold of that part of the material uni- 
verse known to science. Man with his optic tube 
has pushed his conquering way through interstel- 
lar space until he has brought within the range 
of his vision sun stars so enormously distant that 
it takes light, which travels at the rate of 186,330 
miles a second thousands of years to reach us. 
And yet “we find” says Professor Young “no evi- 
dence, no suggestion even, of a limit and a bound 
to the material dominion of Deity. However far 
we penetrate there still seems to be an infinity be- 


Things Which Speak Praise of God’s Glory 81 

yond.” But we must limit our thoughts to this 
planet, a mere speck or atom of the universe. 
When God fashioned this earth as a theater for 
the evolution of human nature, gathered its 
waters into oceans, reared its mountains, garnished 
its plains with richness and beauty, peopled it po- 
tentially with lower animals, swarmed soil and 
air and water with incalculable microscopic life 
and then surveyed His work “He saw that it was 
good.” The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness 
thereof; the world and they that dwell therein. 
For He hath “founded it upon the sea and estab- 
lished it upon the floods.” It was made, “unto 
the praise of His glory.” 

Who are the actors on this theater? We are 
the actors. “God said, let us make man in our 
image, after our likeness; and let him have domin- 
ion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of 
the air, and over the cattle and over all the earth. 
So God created man in his own image.” A race 
is born into the world. Families, tribes, nations 
are begotten. Men and women with widely dif- 
ferent characteristics, opportunities, experiences, 
histories, come and go on this stage all consciously 
or unconsciously performing their part “unto the 
praise of His glory.” These actors are all im- 
mortal spirits clothed in mortal bodies. What a 
marvelous, complex, delicate, beautiful piece of 
mechanism the human body is! “It contains,” 


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says Sir John Lubbock, “more than two hundred 
bones of complex and varied forms, the injury or 
displacement of any one of which would interfere 
with the comfort of the whole. It has five hun- 
dred muscles, each one of which is nourished by a 
vast multitude of blood vessels and regulated by 
nerves. The heart beats over 30,000,000 times 
a year, and yet if it once stops life ceases. The 
skin has over two million perspiration glands, 
which regulate the temperature of the body and 
communicate with the surface by ducts which have 
a total length of some ten miles.” Think of the 
miles of arteries, veins and nerves contained 
within the body; of the composition of the blood; 
of the mechanism of the eye; the structure of the 
hand; the convolutions of the brain. The most 
superficial anatomical examination of the body re- 
veal wonders enough to sound “the praise of His 
glory” who formed it out of the dust. “I will 
praise Thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully 
made.” 

Paul has said “Know ye not that your 
body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is 
in you, which ye have of God and ye are not your 
own? For ye are bought with a price; therefore 
glorify God in your body.” 

But man is a composite being, and the body 
with all its wonders and mysteries is the least 
important part of him. Greater than the body is 


Things Which Speak Praise of God’s Glory 83 

the Spirit which tabernacles in the body, works 
through it and reflects the image of God. A poet 
represents God as expressing His appreciation 
of the superiority of mind in man thus: 

“What is space or time to Me 
That thou shouldst deem mere mightiness of mass 
Or plentitude of time can outweigh mind and soul? 
Can worlds and suns have knowledge of My 
power? 

Can iEons after iEons sing my praise as man 
Gifted by Me with power to know my power can 
teH 

The meaning of the music of the spheres? 

Learn that the least 

Of all the countless minds My will has made 
Outweighs, not once, but many thousand times 
The mightiest mere mass; the thoughts of human 
hearts 

Outvie the movements of a million suns. 

The rush of systems, infinite through space.” 

What a realm for illustration in respect to the 
praise of God’s glory do the discoveries and 
achievements of the human mind open up ! We 
count it a great achievement when Michael An- 
gelo rears a vast temple of beauty like Saint 
Peter’s; when Raphael makes the coarse canvas 
glow with such evidences of genius as reveal them- 
selves in the Transfiguration; when Handel pro- 
duces oratorios in which all the varied musical 
instruments of men and the human voice blend in 


84 The World’s Greatest Classic 

one grand volume of harmony that thrills the 
soul; when Milton, before whose majestic vision, 
heaven, earth and hell seem to be unveiled, writes 
an epic like “Paradise Lost” ; when Newton pene- 
trates the arena of nature and discovers the se- 
crets of its movements and harmony of the ma- 
terial universe; when Immanuel Kant suggests 
the nebular hypothesis by which astronomers are 
now wont to explain the development of the stel- 
lar systems. We tax our powers to express our 
admiration of the notable achievements of these 
masterful minds, who have so enriched human his- 
tory. But who created these men of genius? Do 
not their striking exhibitions of the power and 
possibility of the human intellect sing with em- 
phasis “the praise of His Glory”? Who is the 
supreme creative mind and who made man in 
His image? Vast as human achievements are how 
small is the sum total of human knowledge com- 
pared with the unexplored and the undiscovered 
realms of possible knowledge which lie before 
us ! 

Who knows on the eve of what discoveries we 
may now stand which may open new domains of 
thought, increase man’s knowledge of the com- 
plete and subtle workings of matter and call into 
existence forms of industry which will revolu- 
tionize the conditions of society more than all 
the discoveries and inventions of past history. 


Things Which Speak Praise of God’s Glory 85 

How often have men living held in their hands 
the key which would have unlocked new depart- 
ments in Nature’s laboratory if they had known 
how to turn it in her combination lock. Take the 
case of electric light. Mr. Edison was not its 
discoverer. It had been known for years, before 
he rendered it available for practical purposes, 
that if a carbon rod were placed in an exhausted 
glass receiver and a current of electricity run 
through it the carbon would burn and blaze with 
great brilliancy. But the difficulty was that the 
heat generated was so intense as to burst the re- 
ceiver and render the light for practical purposes 
useless. Mr. Edison’s improvement consisted in 
substituting for the carbon rod, a carbon filament 
fine enough to eliminate the heat and retain the 
light, a change so slight that his right to a patent 
was contested on this very ground. Every dis- 
covery in the realm of matter and of mind, has 
simply tended to increase our knowledge of the 
multitude and greatness of the problems which are 
still unsolved. The greater, the richer, the gran- 
der the triumphs of the human intellect are 
through all coming time, the more they will add 
“unto the praise of His glory.” 

Let us pass on to the mystery of Redemption, 
which God has been gradually unfolding through 
the centuries of human history, Redemption was 
matured in the Divine Mind before time began. 


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“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord 
Jesus Christ . . . Who hath chosen us in Him be- 
fore the foundation of the world that we should be 
holy and without blame before Him in love.” 
Ephesians 1 13-4. 

Look at the successive acts in this great drama 
in which heaven and earth are interested, and in 
which God and man are the chief actors. The 
first parents began their career in sinless inno- 
cence in Eden. They were endowed with freedom 
of will, which is the power of self-determination. 
While God left them to the freedom of their own 
wills He required of them obedience to His com- 
mands. They misused their freedom, chose to 
disobey God and ate “of the tree of the knowl- 
edge of good and evil.” Is not human sin the 
abuse of human faculties, human appetites and 
human passions, all in themselves innocent? The 
curse fell upon them and they were driven forth 
from the garden of Eden. This ends the first 
act. 

A sin-smitten pair, no longer privileged with 
such familiar intercourse with God as when they 
listened in glad innocence to His voice in the gar- 
den — what will their future be? 

In the curse of the serpent we catch the first 
glimmer of the dawning purpose of God and 
find historic sin matched and overmatched by his- 
toric redemption. The seed of “the woman shall 


Things Which Speak Praise of God’s Glory 87 

bruise his heel.” The race multiplies. Its wick- 
edness becomes so rank, rampant, defiant that 
God sweeps it away from the face of the earth 
with a flood, saving only one family from the de- 
struction. This closes the second act. 

Abraham is now called. Let it be remembered 
that whatever in God’s great plan may seem nar- 
row, elective or individual, contemplates in the 
long run the widest possible good. If He chose 
the descendants of Shem to be in a peculiar sense 
the recipients and custodians of revealed truth, 
it was that in the end both Japheth and Ham may 
fully share in the blessing. 

The future begins to grow bright with promise. 
“In thee shall all the families of the earth be 
blessed.” Moses, divinely appointed and provi- 
dentially trained for the work leads a nation 
through the wilderness, where they receive Sinai’s 
law, and a system of religious rites which foresha- 
dow the sublime and eternal truth of redemption, 
through the sacrifice of God’s Eternal Son. When 
these rites lose their power over the minds of 
the people the voice of prophecy is added. But 
even the clarion voice of that prophecy which 
represents the coming of a Great Deliverer whom 
“all shall serve” whose “name shall endure for- 
ever, and whom all nations shall call blessed” 
ceased to stir the National heart and keep it true 
to God. Israel, faithless to duty and privilege at 


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The World's Greatest Classic 


last sinks into a condition of a conquered prov- 
ince of pagan Rome and a night of gloom, crime 
and despair settles over the earth. This ends an- 
other act. 

But out of this night of appalling gloom there 
rises the star of Bethlehem and issues in a new 
day. Over Judea’s plain angels sing, “Glory to 
God in the highest and on earth peace, good will 
toward men.” 

The Great Deliverer now appears. “His 
name is Jesus; for He shall save His people from 
their sins.” His life with its wondrous birth, 
strange temptation, extraordinary baptism, glor- 
ious transfiguration, matchless teachings, trans- 
cendent miracles, unparalleled death, triumphant 
resurrection, victorious ascension; how gentle, im- 
maculate, significant, potential, sublime! To His 
disciples He said, “Thus it is written and thus it 
behooved Christ to suffer and to rise from the 
dead the third day; and that repentance and re- 
mission of sins should be preached in His name 
among all nations beginning at Jerusalem.” 
“Tarry ye in Jerusalem until ye be endued with 
power from on high.” In the act of blessing them 
“He was parted from them and carried up into 
heaven.” 

But we hasten to the final act. The Holy Ghost 
descended and clothed these waiting witnesses with 
a new and resistless power. Scattered by persecu- 


Things Which Speak Praise of God’s Glory 89 

tion, opposed by fire and sword, with dauntless 
courage they moved steadily on in the fulfillment 
of their commission to preach “repentance and 
remission of sins” in His name among all nations. 

The banner of the cross has been handed from 
one generation to another from that time until 
now. In each century of its history it has won 
more splendid victories and made grander con- 
quests than in any preceding century. There never 
was a time since the fire baptism of Pentecost 
when so many were engaged in the systematic 
study of the Scriptures, or when the Christian 
Church was doing so much at home and in heathen 
lands to bring the world under the dominion of 
Christ, as at the present hour. 

“Out of the shadows of night 

The world rolls into the light. 

It is day break everywhere.” 

Do not the triumphs of Christianity in the over- 
throw of degrading superstitions, in the banish- 
ment of slavery and caste, in girdling the earth 
with churches, in carrying light and love into the 
regions of darkness and the habitations of 
cruelty, sound “the praise of His glory,” who 
called this earth into existence, created man to 
occupy it, and by His grace redeems and regen- 
erates him? And in the coming ages, as nations, 
peoples and tribes swing into majestic line until 


90 The World's Greatest Classic 

earth’s entire population shall, with love and 
loyalty march under the banner of the cross, will 
not the spectacle speak of “the praise of His 
glory” who “hath on his vesture and His thigh a 
name written, King of kings and Lord of lords”? 

On this great stage, in this majestic drama, are 
we in this generation faithfully performing our 
part “Unto the praise of His glory?” 

But the vision widens. When the present dis- 
pensation shall have ended, and a new and more 
glorious heaven and earth shall emerge from its 
predicted cataclysm of fire, and the whole family, 
God, angels and the redeemed and glorified of our 
race, shall be gathered together will not their 
progress and achievements through the unwast- 
ing millenniums of eternity still be “unto the praise 
of His glory.” Will not their everlasting song 
be “Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory 
and honor and power, for thou hast created all 
things, and for thy pleasure they are and were 
created.” 


VII 


THE SUPREME CHALLENGE 

The story of the life of Jesus Christ as told in 
the gospels is full of thrilling episodes, startling 
surprises and impressive incidents. The more 
perfectly we understand the era in which He lived, 
the more carefully we examine conditions in which 
He moved the more wonderful does His life ap- 
pear. About a year after He began His work 
as an itinerant teacher and preacher, one day as 
he passed the custom booth, or office of a collector 
of taxes, in the town of Capernaum, He paused 
and said to its occupant “Follow me.” As we 
think of Jesus now He rises before the mind and 
imagination as older than Adam, grander than 
Moses, wiser than Solomon, profounder than 
Plato, more imperial than Caesar, the most over- 
mastering personage of all history, the only per- 
fect character of all time. Now that poets and 
philosophers, historians and statesmen confess 
that His teachings transcend and inspire .the lofti- 
est intellects, transform and beautify the lowliest 
human life, it is no marvel that men should obey 
His call. The only marvel is that in the face of 
91 


92 The World’s Greatest Classic 

nineteen centuries of Christian history any man 
who has heard the gospel should be found out- 
side the ranks of His followers. But when He 
paused at this publican’s office He stood at the 
opening of His matchless career. To the eye of 
sense He was simply a Galilean mechanic who a 
few months before had begun to set forth by word 
and deed the truths which He had come out of 
the eternities to reveal. Doubtless this was not 
the first time that Matthew had seen or heard 
Him. We can readily suppose that he was one 
of the throng that crowded the Synagogue in 
Capernaum when Jesus spoke there, or one of the 
multitude who gathered around Him on the peb- 
bly beach of the adjacent lake. 

Now, what did Matthew see in Jesus that in 
the judgment of a shrewd, keen, practical busi- 
ness man such as he was, justified him in giving 
up an official position, abandoning a lucrative 
calling, to follow a homeless itinerant teacher 
who said in words that will never lose their pathos, 
“The foxes have holes and the birds of the air 
have nests but the Son of man hath not where to 
lay His head.” 

I think that the first thing that impressed Mat- 
thew, as it has impressed the world through all 
the centuries since, was the uniqueness, the un- 
paralleled richness, the strange sublimity of the 
truth which He taught. 


The Supreme Challenge 93 

What is the mightiest thing in this world? The 
mightiest thing in this world is ideas. They have 
wrought greater revolutions, achieved grander 
victories and brought about more colossal results 
than all the armies of time. 

Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton each 
gave to the world an idea. But these ideas have 
changed man’s conceptions of the plan of the 
starry heavens, opened up new visions of the 
illimitable vastness of the material universe, un- 
veiled its hidden wonders, explained the secret of 
its harmony and enhanced in human estimate its 
glory. 

The name of Watt, Stephenson, Fulton, Morse, 
Edison is associated with one idea. These ideas 
have become so embodied in physical forms that 
they have practically annihilated distance and 
brought the most widely separated inhabitants of 
the earth into comparatively easy communication 
with each other. 

Jesus was a man of ideas. Even those who re- 
pudiate His divine claims affirm that He is the 
greatest moral and religious teacher this world 
has ever seen. Jesus was a Jew familiar with the 
sacred writings of the Jews. What lofty language 
do the Hebrew Scriptures employ to set forth 
God in His might and majesty. “Who hath meas- 
ured the waters in the hollow of His hand and 
meted out heaven with a span and comprehended 


94 The World's Greatest Classic 

the dust of the earth in a measure and weighed 
the mountains in scales and the hills in a bal- 
ance?” — Isaiah 40:12. “He that formed the 
mountains and created the wind and declareth unto 
man what is his thought, that maketh the morning 
darkness and treadeth upon the high places of the 
earth, the Lord, the God of Hosts is His name.” 

Jesus taught that this God was man’s father 
and such was the infinite greatness of His love for 
the children of men that He counted nothing too 
costly to sacrifice for their sakes. The Fatherhood 
of God and the brotherhood of man were truths 
as new to the contemporaries of Jesus as was the 
law of gravitation to the men of Newton’s day, 
or the circulation of the blood through the body 
to the men of Harvey’s time. 

Take any or all of the mightiest movements 
of which this world has been the theater during 
the past nineteen hundred years, — the Renais- 
sance which has to do with the revival of art and 
of learning; the Reformation which has to do with 
the revival of religion; the growth of democracy 
which has to do with the establishment of the 
rights and liberty of the people and call the names 
of some of their great actors. There is Raphael 
making the coarse canvas glow with his immortal 
ideas; Angelo changing the shapeless marble into 
images of life and beauty; Wycliffe translating 
the Scriptures into the language of the common 


The Supreme Challenge 95 

people; Luther proclaiming by pen and tongue 
the truths of an exhumed gospel; William of 
Orange and Cromwell battling for the civil rights 
of the people ; Garrison and Lincoln laboring and 
suffering for the amelioration and freedom of 
the enslaved. All these men and multitudes more 
whose deeds are emblazoned on the pages of his- 
tory drew the inspiration of their acts and achieve- 
ments from the teachings of Jesus. It is the 
world’s supreme genius, the most overmastering 
personage of all time who speaks when he says, 
“Follow me.” 

Jesus furnished the world with a new conception 
of the meaning of life. What does He declare to 
be the chief end of human life? He sums it up 
in one word, Service. Of Himself He said, “The 
Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but 
to minister and to give His life a ransom for 
many.” To His disciples He said: “Whosoever 
will be greatest among you let him be your min- 
ister; whosoever will be your chief let him be 
your servant.” True greatness according to the 
divine estimate does not consist in position, how- 
ever exalted, whether secured by birth or acquired 
by personal energy; nor in talents however many, 
nor in acquisition material or intellectual, how- 
ever great, but in work beneficently done. 

The man who is first good and does the great- 
est amount of good in this world is in God’s sight 


96 The World’s Greatest Classic 

the greatest. This is the truth which needs to be 
blazed in upon the souls of men in this and every 
age. Selfish ambition when held up in the light 
of eternity is not only paltry and pitiful but it 
places men in opposition to the moral forces of 
the universe and in antagonism to God Himself. 
History here and there presents startling illus- 
trations of the ruin it often brings upon the ac- 
tors. Haman plots and plans to ruin an inno- 
cent man who had wounded his pride and was 
ready to reek vengeance at the price of a nation’s 
life. God for a time looks on. The tragedy 
ends in Mordecai passing on to higher honor and 
assured immortality, while Haman passes as a 
criminal to the gallows and his name into history 
to become a beacon of warning. The race he 
would have exterminated still lives and annually 
tells afresh the story of his colossal crime in one 
of its religious feasts. Napoleon plowed Europe 
with cannon and wrecked nations to build up a 
great Empire that would perpetuate his name and 
fame. But Napoleon was swept into exile and 
died a powerless prisoner, while every selfish 
scheme for which he soaked the soil of Europe 
with blood to establish has vanished like the base- 
less fabric of a dream. 

On the other hand George Washington unsel- 
fishly periled his life, wealth, every interest which 
he possessed for the cause of human freedom and 


The Supreme Challenge 97 

as a consequence his name is the most august in 
the annals of this nation and one of the grandest 
in the history of the world. 

Jesus stands forth as the sublimest optimist 
in history. He lived in an age when crime was 
rampant and brutal, and rulers were the agents 
of wickedness. When He undertook the redemp- 
tion of our race and called men to be His fol- 
lowers He was conscious of His own reserve 
powers. He looked beyond the scowls of those 
who hated Him and the plots of those who were 
seeking His death and saw Satan defeated, sin 
atoned for, brotherly love, social amelioration, 
civil liberty born into the world. As His eye 
swept the coming ages He saw righteousness and 
truth enshrined in art and literature, enthroned 
in legislation, jurisprudence, commerce and social 
intercourse. He saw men and women who felt 
for Him a love and exhibited a loyalty which 
flames could not destroy nor floods drown. In 
this vision of a redeemed and transformed world 
He saw of the travail of his soul, felt the joy of 
the conqueror and was satisfied. 

Jesus not only taught truth that was unparal- 
leled in richness and gave the world a new concep- 
tion of the meaning of life as viewed from the 
divine standpoint, but held Himself as the per- 
fect imitable example for all men in every time 
and place. There is no argument so potent and 


98 The World's Greatest Classic 

convincing, no speech so eloquent and persuasive 
as a magnificent example. Dean Stanley in speak- 
ing of the power of Dr. Arnold over the boys of 
Rugby says, “It was not so much an enthusiastic 
admiration for true genius, or learning, or elo- 
quence which stirred within them; it was a sym- 
pathetic thrill caught from a spirit that was earn- 
estly at work in the world, whose work was 
healthy, sustained, carried forward in the fear of 
God, a work that was founded on a deep sense 
of its duty and its value.” Jesus moved amid the 
needy masses of His countrymen, curing repul- 
sive lepers, flashing the power of vision on sight- 
less eyeballs, sending new life thrilling through 
palsied limbs, enlightening darkened minds, point- 
ing to a possible heaven of eternal glory, yet 
seeking no applause, aspiring to no secular do- 
minion but confronting opposition, bearing per- 
secution and accepting the cross that He might 
save the world. The matchless power of His 
example to change character and call forth all 
that is noblest and grandest in human nature is 
strikingly illustrated by three men, Peter, John 
and Paul — men who have as profoundly affected 
the history of this world as any other three men 
in all history. Under His tuition Peter, a com- 
paratively illiterate fisherman became a great 
preacher, exhibiting the wisdom of a far seeing 
ruler of men; John is fitted to open the profound- 


The Supreme Challenge 99 

est and grandest biography the world possesses 
— a gospel that takes its place as literature’s mas- 
terpiece; Paul, mighty in intellect handling with 
consummate ease the largest speculations of his 
time, magnificent in character, heroic in action, be- 
came the author of epistles which have commanded 
the reverence and governed the cultivated thought 
of the centuries. And these are only typical cases. 
He has been doing the same down through the 
ages. 

What is the task to which He calls his fol- 
lowers? It is to penetrate this world from its in- 
nermost center to its outermost circumference — 
the world of lofty thought, ceaseless energy and 
magnificent possibilities, as well as the world of 
common toil, crushed hopes, hideous vice and dark 
despair with His light, life and love. Men by 
imitating the example and reproducing the life 
of Christ become great as well as good. Howard 
in giving his life and fortune to the work of 
prison reform and at last dying of a prison fever, 
and Livingstone in laboring for the civilization 
and evangelization of Africa and at last being 
found dead on his knees in a hut in the heart of 
that continent, were not only happy in their work 
but have won a more imperishable name among 
men than they could have done in any other way. 

What a land and age this is in which we live 
for privilege, opportunity, possibility. Some 


ioo The World's Greatest Classic 

think that we emphasize these things to the point 
of boastfulness. Wendell Phillips, an orator who 
sometimes dipped his pen in gall and spoke in 
words that scorched, once said, that the Ameri- 
can people reminded him of a German teacher 
whom the poet Coleridge met in Frankfort, who 
always took off his hat with the profoundest re- 
spect when he spoke of himself, and that Ameri- 
cans ought to be painted in the chronic attitude of 
taking off their hats to themselves. But when we 
remember that it was an American who demon- 
strated the practicability of navigation by steam 
on the Hudson river, that it was an American who 
discovered the identity of lightning and electricity; 
that it was an American who seized the spirit of 
thunder, geared and harnessed it, and compelled 
it to do man’s bidding by giving us the system of 
telegraphy; that it was an American who laid 
a cable along the bed of the Atlantic and enables 
us to speak to the nations of Europe through three 
thousand miles of stormy sea; that it was an 
American who gave us the telephone which bridges 
space and annihilates distance; that in the con- 
struction of the Panama Canal America has com- 
pleted the most gigantic enterprise ever attempted 
by man, it may be modestly said that there are 
some things of which the American people may 
legitimately be proud. 

As an illustration of national unselfishness and 


The Supreme Challenge ioi 

magnanimity which probably has no parallel in 
history take our war with Spain in behalf of 
Cuba. I think it can be truthfully said that this 
country, with no feeling of enmity for Spain, with 
no desire for territorial acquisition, with no thirst 
for military glory, with no covert purpose for 
national aggrandizement, simply prompted by 
feelings of humanity, desired to put an end to 
centuries of misrule and miseries which threat- 
ened the extermination of a people. The proof 
of that is that our government not only removed 
the crushing burdens of Cuba but by scientific 
sanitation rendered her cities healthy, built for 
her schools, and hospitals, put her finances on a 
sound basis, taught her the principles of self- 
government and then launched her as an inde- 
pendent nation among the nations of the world. 

That the glory of sacrifice, the grandeur of 
service and the beauty of altruism as revealed in 
the teachings and exhibited in the life of Jesus 
have more fully entered the heart of the world 
and taken hold of the lives of men and women, 
is seen in the war that has shaken the world. 

The Christian Church has her defects so strik- 
ing that any one can easily point them out ; yet un- 
questionably she represents the mightiest mass of 
noble living, the most unselfish service, the grand- 
est ministries of mercy to be found in the world 
to-day. 


102 The World's Greatest Classic 

Look at the enthusiasm which throbs in the 
heart of the Church for the cause of Christian 
missions and the success with which her labors are 
being crowned. The Christian Church of Amer- 
ica has not confined her labors to her own coun- 
try. 

In hoary Asia, in dark Africa, in the islands of 
the sea, in every part of the earth where spirit- 
ual ignorance and miseries abound her missions 
are to be found. If the Psalmist said, “The lines 
have fallen unto me in pleasant places; yea I have 
a goodly heritage,’’ what should we say to whom 
science brings her marvelous discoveries, art her 
surprising creations, literature her mighty thoughts 
the Church her glorious experiences and offer them 
to us for our use. 

Who doubts that Christianity will ultimately 
bring all nations to worship at her shrine, share 
her hopes and enjoy her blessings? Has not the 
immutable promise of God gone forth that Christ 
“Shall have dominion from sea to sea” and that 
“all nations shall serve Him and at His name 
every knee shall bow of things in heaven and 
things in earth and things under the earth, and 
that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ 
is lord to the glory of God the Father.” 


VIII 


THE MOST WONDERFUL PEOPLE OF 
ALL HISTORY 

Frederick the Great of Prussia, one of the 
rough, strong, unamiable characters of history, 
whose cruel and unfortunate training in youth 
had hardened his heart and destroyed his faith in 
religion, once imperiously demanded from his 
chaplain a proof in a single sentence of the truth 
of Christianity. “The Jews, your Majesty,” was 
the response. This was a reply at once profound 
and comprehensive. The Jews are the most 
unique and extraordinary people in existence and 
of all history. Although their name is sometimes 
flung at them as an opprobrium, they glory in it. 
And well they may. Were not such men as Abra- 
ham, the patriarch; Moses, the lawgiver; David, 
the poet; Elijah, the reformer; Isaiah, the 
prophet; Daniel, the statesman; Ezra, the theolo- 
gian; Nehemiah, the patriot; that brilliant galaxy 
of moral heroes, whose influence increase with the 
ebb of the millenniums — Jews? Who wrote the 
Bible with its stately narratives, its thrilling his- 
tories, its sublime poetry, its lofty eloquence, its 
103 


104 The World's Greatest Classic 

profound philosophy, its matchless deeds of moral 
heroism? They were Jews. Was not Jesus, the 
most overmastering personage of all time, the 
one who turned the stream of history into new 
channels, a Jew? Were not the men who laid 
the foundations of Christian civilization and gave 
us the New Testament, Jews? Christendom owes 
more to the Jews than to all other peoples com- 
bined. These are patent facts we sometimes for- 
get. 

Let us pass in swift review a few prophecies 
bearing on this remarkable people which have 
been fulfilled or which are now being fulfilled be- 
fore our eyes. The subject is a large one and 
can only be touched upon in the most fragmen- 
tary way. Take this statement (Ps. 105-14) “He 
suffered no man to do them wrong” — that is with 
impunity — “yea he reproved kings for their 
sakes.” 

Prophecy is not designed to give us the same 
knowledge of the future that history does of the 
past. It foretells great events, but the time and 
manner in which these events occur and their 
results can only be learned from the events them- 
selves. Turn to the pages of history and ex- 
amine the fulfillment of this prophecy. Can you 
mention the name of a ruler or a nation who was 
a Jewish persecutor, who did not suffer for it? 
The autocratic Pharaoh ground them beneath the 


The Most Wonderful People of All History 105 

heel of an iron despotism, and under the lash of 
slave masters demanded the fulfillment of impos- 
sible tasks. As a consequence, was not the whole 
Egyptian nation smitten by the death of the first- 
born of every family, the land desolated, its rivers 
turned into blood, the king and his army buried 
in the sea? 

Sennacherib, the most powerful of the kings 
of Assyria, invaded their land for the purpose 
of wresting it from them. Did not the angel of 
God go forth against him and in one night smite 
185,000 of his steel-clad warriors? 

Byron, who was a student of the Bible because 
of its literary qualities thus describes that scene: 

“And there lay the rider distorted and pale 
The dew on his brow and the rust on his mail 
And the tents were all silent and the banners 
alone 

The lances unlifted, the trumpets unblown 
For the might of the Gentiles unsmote by the 
sword 

Has melted like snow in the glance of the Lord.” 

Sennacherib fled back to Nineveh to be mur- 
dered by two of his sons. Nebuchadnezzar, a 
brilliant general and able statesman, who could 
have said more truthfully than Louis XIV, “I am 
the State,” and whose ambition was to make 
Babylon, what Napoleon strove to render Paris, 


io 6 The World’s Greatest Classic 

the incomparable metropolis of the world, in- 
vaded their land, overthrew their government, 
burned Jerusalem and carried them into exile. 
Was he not bereft of his reason so that he im- 
agined himself a beast and ate grass like an ox? 

Belshazzar to show his contempt for their most 
holy things, gave a great banquet to his nobles 
and concubines and out of the sacred vessels of 
the temple which had been carried to Babylon, 
drank to his gods. But while engaged in this 
sacrilegious act, did not a bodiless hand come 
forth and write his doom on the wall? 

“That night they slew him on his father’s throne, 
The deed unnoticed and the hand unknown 
Crownless and sceptreless Belshazzar lay 
A robe of purple round a form of clay.” 

Antiochus Epiphanes, in the hope of extirpat- 
ing their religion treated them with a cruelty that 
taxes credulity. But he was seized with a terrific 
malady and after suffering great torture, died in 
terror and remorse confessing that his death was 
due to the miseries he had inflicted upon the Jews. 

Caligula, persecuted them with remorseless 
cruelty, because they refused to pay divine hon- 
ors to his statue. But after a short and infamous 
reign he was murdered. Why swell the cata- 
logue? The teaching of history is that the ruler 


The Most Wonderful People of All History 107 

or the nation who wantonly persecuted this 
unique people, has been severely punished. 

Take another prophecy. Thus saith the Lord 
through the mouth of Jeremiah (30:11) at a 
period of the nation’s greatest degradation, when 
about to be led captives into a foreign land, “I 
will make a full end of all the nations whither 
I have driven thee, but I will not make an end 
of thee.” 

What an extraordinary and improbable event 
that this little nation once planted in the midst 
of the mighty empires of the ancient world, should 
outlive them all! But read the records of his- 
tory. Representatives of Christian jnations, 
archaeologists, philosophers, scholars, are clear- 
ing away the sands of the desert and the de- 
posits of the Nile and laying bare ruins that have 
been hid for centuries. That is all that remains 
of Heliopolis, Memphis and Thebes, cities which 
once evinced the power and glory of Egypt. Yon- 
der, amid weird and dreary solitudes on the banks 
of the Tigris and of the Euphrates, are shapeless 
mounds. These are all that remain of Nineveh 
and of Babylon the great and magnificent capi- 
tals of vast empires. What has become of the 
would-be world powers, the kingdoms of Egypt, 
Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Pagan Rome, 
Goths and Saracens? They have passed away as 


108 The World* s Greatest Classic 

completely as if they had never existed. But the 
Jews, whose history stretches far beyond the 
founding of Rome on the banks of the Tiber, or 
the events sung by Homer in his Iliad, are here 
in our midst, as one of us. The character of all 
modern nations is composite, the blood of differ- 
ent races commingling in their veins. The Eng- 
lish nation is made up of Britons, Romans, Sax- 
ons, Danes and Normans. This country is made 
up of representatives of all nationalities. The 
same is true of the great nations of Europe, but 
the Jews, says Freeman, the historian, “are very 
nearly if not absolutely a pure race, in a sense in 
which no other race is pure — their blood has 
been untouched by conversion even by intermar- 
riage.” 

Is not the preservation of the Jews amid the 
revolution of time, the rise and fall of nations 
and their complete disappearance from the earth, 
amid the mutations of more than forty centuries, 
a signal and convincing proof of the truth of 
God’s word concerning them? 

Take another prophecy uttered by Moses, on 
the plains of Moab, just before he handed over 
his national leaderships to Joshua and ascended 
Mount Neboh to die. He said (Deut. 28:64) : 
“The Lord shall scatter thee among all people 
from one end of the earth even unto the other 
end of it.” Has not this prophecy been literally 


The Most PFonderful People of All History 109 

fulfilled? In what part of the earth to-day do you 
fail to find the Jews? They are to be found in 
Europe, Asia, Africa, America, in every country 
and in every great city of the world where com- 
merce is carried on and the opportunities for gain 
exist. Although they are without a country and 
nowhere, so far as we are aware, are permitted 
to elect their own magistrates: without a temple 
where their religion and sacrifies can be fully ob- 
served, yet, everywhere in all lands they maintain 
unimpaired their solidarity. There is no mis- 
taking the Jew; the same physiognomy, the jaw, 
nose, eye, beard which appears sculptured on the 
exhumed pillars and monumental stones of 
Egypt, Assyria and Babylon, can be seen on the 
streets of Petrograd, Constantinople, Berlin, 
Paris, London, New York to-day. 

If Abraham and Mordecai should step forth 
from their graves of centuries we should recog- 
nize them as Jews. These are facts which address 
the senses as well as the intellect. 

Take another prophecy uttered by Moses in 
his valedictory address (Deut. 28:65) : “Among 
all the nations shalt thou find no ease, neither 
shall the sole of thy foot have rest.” The his- 
tory of the Jews in medieval and in modern times 
as well as in ancient times, has been too often 
written in blood and tears. They havej been 
driven from country to country, sold as slaves, 


i io The World’ s Greatest Classic 

placed beyond the protection of the law so that 
their wealth could be wrung from them by greedy 
kings and needy nobles. They have been ex- 
pelled at different times from England, France, 
Germany, Spain, Portugal, from almost every 
country in Europe. 

Take one act of Spain as a specimen of her 
feeling for and treatment of the Jews. In the 
year 1492 the year made famous by the discovery 
of America, and just a short time before her cap- 
ture of Granada, an edict was issued by Ferdinand 
and Isabella giving the Jews four months to quit 
the realm. Some historians have placed the num- 
ber in Spain at that time as high as 800,000. 
Their fathers had dwelt in that beautiful land for 
three centuries, they had fertilized it with their 
industry, enriched it with their commerce and 
adorned it with their learning. But they were 
compelled to leave their homes and the things 
which they could not carry with them, the syna- 
gogues where they worshiped God, the schools 
which they had maintained and had shed luster on 
the Hebrew name and go into exile they knew not 
where. Some of them were flung into the sea 
from the ships on which they embarked, some 
died broken-hearted and others found places to 
live in other lands only too often to experience 
fresh persecution. Look at the effect upon Spain. 
She has sunk from a first-class power to an im- 


The Most W onderful People of All History 1 1 1 

poverished fifth-rate power. And yet in this 
twentieth century there are Christian nations 
who pride themselves on their prowess and civil- 
ization who connive at or aid and abet the per- 
secution of the Jews. There is the Russian Em- 
pire, that has been, which embraces an area equal 
to one-sixth of the land surface of the globe with 
a population of 170,000,000, and what was her 
attitude toward the Jews? Did she not wantonly, 
brutally massacre defenseless men, women and 
children for no other reason than that Semitic 
blood flowed in their veins? Have not these 
periodic outrages of pillage and murder on the 
part of ignorant hordes been connived at and 
condoned by unprincipled and corrupt bureau- 
cracy? If God has hitherto called Jewish perse- 
cutors to a fearful account, may not history be 
repeating itself in the crushing humiliation, 
the political throes, the frightful sufferings 
through which that nation is now passing. Take 
another prophecy of warning uttered by the great 
lawgiver just before Israel entered the land of 
promise. “Thou shalt become an astonishment, a 
proverb and a by-word whither the Lord shall 
lead thee away” (Deut. 28:37). Has not this 
prediction been fulfilled to the letter? That keen- 
ness, shrewdness and unscrupulousness which do 
not allow conscience, truth and honesty to stand 
in the way of gain or the best side of a bargain, 


1 12 The World's Greatest Classic 

are popularly regarded as Jewish traits. When a 
man has been imposed upon in a manner strik- 
ingly shrewd, he says he has been Jewed. Some- 
body has defined shrewdness as an “Irish York- 
shireman of Scottish extraction with a Yankee 
education.” 

When the genius of Shakespeare would portray 
a character that would excite our abhorrence he 
gives us Shylock the Venetian Jew. When Dick- 
ens would draw a type of character that we would 
forever damn, he describes the conduct of Fagin 
the London Jew. In this way are we not uncon- 
sciously fulfilling prophecy which declared that 
they would become “a proverb and a by-word.” 
Do not these prophecies which have been cited 
and which have been so strikingly fulfilled in his- 
tory, prove the truth of the sacred Scriptures? 
Who but the Spirit of God could have enabled 
the Jewish seers to have accurately foretold the 
most improbable events thousands of years be- 
fore they came to pass? 

What has been the secret of the marvelous his- 
tory of this strange people? They never had the 
brilliant culture of the Greek, the genius for con- 
quest and organization of the Roman, the versa- 
tility of the French, the artistic skill of the Italian, 
the integrity and daring enterprise of the Anglo- 
Saxon. Their own prophets characterize them as 
stiffnecked, rebellious and untractable people. But 


The Most W onderful People of All History 1 13 

they have been the channel through which has 
been given to the world that conception of God 
which is its richest possession and underlies every 
blessing of Christian civilization. In their earli- 
est writings as well as in the later productions of 
their great seers and statesmen, they taught the 
Personality, Unity, Spirituality, Omniscience, Al- 
mightiness, Creatorship and Providence of God. 
The Bible, their national literature, is the only 
book in existence which admits of being trans- 
lated into every tongue spoken by man and is 
equally adapted to all peoples of the earth; the 
only book which purifies the language into which 
it is translated, civilizes the untamed savage, 
transforms and ennobles the nation which receives 
it. 

Let us turn from the past to the present. It 
is impossible to determine with exactness the total 
number of the Jews at the present time. The best 
authorities place the number about fifteen mil- 
lions, scattered among five or six hundred mil- 
lions of Christians and Moslems. It is only 
within the last half of the nineteenth century that 
most of the nations of Europe rescinded the ter- 
rific laws on their statute books, which denied this 
people civil liberty and social rights and accorded 
them the same privileges as Christian subjects. 

There still remain two nations in Europe, Rus- 
sia and Roumania, which contain nearly one-half 


1 14 The World's Greatest Classic 

of all the Jews of the world, who still refuse to 
grant them the same rights enjoyed by others. 

Look how this marvelous people; who have 
passed through centuries of unparalleled cruelties 
and who have so recently been emancipated from 
the most humiliating disabilities which the inge- 
nuity of their enemies could devise, when they have 
an opportunity to push to the front. “There can 
be no doubt,” says Leroy Beaulieu, “that the Jews, 
the so-called Semites, have given proportionately 
more men of talent to our Aryan civilization than 
the so-called Aryans themselves. The six or 
seven million European Jews have furnished rela- 
tively more men of talent than the three hundred 
millions of Catholic, Protestant and Greek Chris- 
tians.” 

Take at random a few names from among many 
that might be cited, illustrative of their intellect- 
ual ability and their genius along many lines. 

There is Spinoza, the philosopher, Heine the 
poet, Mendelssohn and Rubinstein the composers, 
Rachel and Bernhardt the actresses. We 
might be astonished if we knew how many of this 
race to-day occupy important chairs of instruction 
in institutions of learning, thus helping to mould 
the plastic minds of the young, or are the owners 
and editors of journals which aid powerfully in 
shaping public opinion. 

In no department will the conspicuous ability 


The Most W onderful People of All History 1 15 

of the Jew be more readily conceded than in busi- 
ness and finance. Let one illustration of the origin 
of the house of one of their money kings suffice. 
In the Jewish quarters in the city of Frankfort- 
on-the-Main a hundred years ago there lived a 
money changer, over the door of whose house 
there hung as a sign a red shield. The man’s 
name was Meyer Anselm, whose surname, derived 
from the Red Shield, was Rothschild. He was 
noted for unusual dexterity, by the simple touch 
of his finger, in determining the value of foreign 
coin. At the same time he was believed to be a 
man of strict honesty. In his business as a dealer 
in old coins he had made acquaintance of the land- 
grave of Hesse Cassel. In the year 1793 when 
the French entered this region the landgrave gal- 
loping up to the door of the Jew and dashing in 
said, “Anselm, I know of old your trustworthi- 
ness. Here are my family jewels; here is my 
money. Save the jewels if you can and do with 
the money what you think best.” and then fled 
before the enemy took possession of the city. Ten 
years passed before order was reestablished and 
it was safe for the landgrave to return. Meyer 
Anselm concealed the jewels in a wall in his cel- 
lar and during the ten years used the money of the 
absent prince in such a way as to increase it im- 
mensely. When the impoverished prince returned 
Meyer Anselm met him, restored to him his 


ii 6 The World’s Greatest Classic 

family jewels and laid before him his money im- 
mensely increased by large interest. This was 
the beginning of the extraordinary success of the 
Rothschilds. The Prince spread the story of An- 
selm’s honorable conduct and in ten years he was 
the money king of Europe. When dying in 1812 
he made his five sons bind themselves by oath 
that they would always remain Jews, that they 
would carry on the business in company, that they 
would increase their wealth but never divide it. 
This oath they have kept. Each of the five sons 
established himself in one of the money centers 
of the world. Nathan, the third son, became the 
head of the London house, and through his adroit- 
ness and audacity increased its importance and 
added immensely to their wealth. 

Take a single act as an illustration of his sagac- 
ity, enterprise and daring. Just before the battle 
of Waterloo, when Londoners feared the result 
and the price of British consols were depressed, 
Nathan without anybody knowing anything of his 
movements, slipped out of London, crossed into 
Belgium to watch from a safe nook in the battle- 
field the progress of the battle with as great eager- 
ness as Wellington or Napoleon. When he saw 
that Napoleon was defeated he exultingly ex- 
claimed, “the House of Rothschild has won the 
day” — leaped upon a horse that he had kept sad- 
dled beside him and rode as fast as he could for 


The Most Wonderful People of All History 1 17 

the shore of the German Sea. The sea was 
so storm-tossed that no vessel would venture out, 
but riding along the shore he at last found a bold 
fisherman who for a large bribe took him across. 
Then with whip and spur he soon reached Lon- 
don and early the next morning was at exchange, 
no one knowing of his absence. He moved among 
the bankers and brokers, with the appearance of 
one who thought that all was lost for England. 
Stocks fell to the lowest point and a panic seemed 
impending, but he and his agents quietly bought 
up these British consols. On the evening of that 
day when Nathan Meyer had bought at a low 
figure all the consols he could obtain, govern- 
ment couriers galloped into London with the first 
clear news of England’s signal victory. The city 
was illuminated. On the exchange the next day 
British consols advanced immensely so as to net 
Rothschild ten millions of dollars. Thus has the 
fortune of the Rothschilds advanced, until prac- 
tically peace or war in Europe hangs upon their 
approval or disapproval. Lionel Rothschild, the 
eldest son of Nathan, and his successor the head 
of the banking house became equally famous al- 
though in a different way. He was the first son of 
his race to be admitted to a seat in the English 
Parliament. He was a man of agreeable manners, 
popular with royalty and nobles and was elected to 
Parliament in 1847 before the abrogation of Jew- 


1 1 8 The World's Greatest Classic 

ish disabilities. When he appeared at the bar of 
the House of Commons, to take the oath for ten 
successive years he was rejected because he refused 
to utter the words, “on the faith of a Christian.” 
The agitation went on until at last prejudice gave 
way, the disabilities were removed and he was ad- 
mitted. 

If the modern Jews have among them money 
kings who hoard their wealth and wield it as an 
instrument of power, they have also among them 
men who love their fellow men, as proved by their 
munificent gifts and devoted labors in their be- 
half. Moses Montefiore related by marriage to 
the Rothschilds was one of the most illustrious 
philanthropists of modern time. He expended 
vast sums, wisely and well, in many lands for the 
amelioration of the condition of his fellow Jews. 
He visited many lands in their behalf and pleaded 
with rulers, petty and powerful, with Czar and 
Pope, and thus stayed ruthless hands from in- 
flicting needless suffering on helpless victims. In 
•1884 when he had reached the age of a hundred 
the whole civilized world showed its admiration 
for him and its appreciation of his noble philan- 
thropies by celebrating his birthday. Nor did he 
confine his charities exclusively to the Jews al- 
though a thoroughly orthodox Jew himself. He 
was generous in his gifts to Gentiles and helped 
to build Protestant churches, to found hospitals 


The Most W onderful People of All History 1 19 

for Catholics and Turks, to lift up the power of all 
races and colors. 

The Jew, since the opportunity has been ac- 
corded him, has revealed his power in the realm 
of statesmanship. In the last half of the nine- 
teenth century Disraeli in England, Lasker in 
Germany, Gambetta in France and Castelar in 
Spain rose to astonishing heights of influence and 
power. They were all men of commanding ability, 
masters of the spoken word, who swayed assem- 
blies and fascinated the masses. They represented 
different political creeds, English toryism, Ger- 
man liberalism, French republicanism and Span- 
ish progress. Although Disraeli was by profes- 
sion a Christian, he was proud of his Jewish 
blood as he regarded Christianity as only Judaism 
completed. He said Jesus “is the fairest flower 
and eternal pride of the Jewish race, a son of the 
chosen royal family of the chosen people, — the 
people which in an intellectual sense has con- 
quered Europe and the quarters of the world peo- 
pled by Europeans. Northern Europe worships 
the son of a Jewish mother and gives him a place 
at the right hand of the Creator: Southern Eu- 
rope worships besides as queen of heaven a Jewish 
maiden.” 

England, which until less than half a century 
ago denied the Jew political rights and privileges, 
solicitous for the fame of Beaconsfield, invented 


120 The World's Greatest Classic 

a new holiday in his honor; and every spring on 
Primrose-day he looks down from his pedestal 
upon ladies of the highest rank who come to lay 
at his feet basketfuls of his favorite flower. “If 
you wish,” says a writer, “to sum up under a sin- 
gle head or in a single imaginary person the sa- 
lient characteristics of the race — the modern Jew, 
the social cultivated Jew, who has wound his way 
into our life, may be likened to a youth of pre- 
cocious intelligence that can be turned to almost 
anything, calculating by instinct, practical by na- 
ture, concealing at times beneath material tenden- 
cies a germ of poetic feeling that soon dries up, 
fit for anything and really sufficiently dexterous 
to make their way everywhere.” 

To thoroughly understand the Jews, in addi- 
tion to their sacred writings, especially the Mosaic 
law, you must take into consideration the extraor- 
dinary influence of the teachings of the Talmud 
upon them during the long centuries of their per- 
secution. The Talmud, which Dean Milman calls 
“a wonderful monument of human industry, hu- 
man wisdom and human folly,” is composed of 
two parts, the Mishnah which is the text, and the 
Gemmara, which is commentaries upon the text. 
The Mishnah is supposed to be oral laws which 
God communicated to Moses at Sinai in addition 
to the laws contained in the Pentateuch. Moses 
communicated these oral laws in turn to the sev- 


The Most Wonderful People of All History 121 

enty elders and they again to other great teachers, 
thus transmitting them from age to age until 
finally they were committed to writing at the end 
of the second century A.D. 

The Gemmara is a commentary consisting of 
the opinions of the great Jewish teachers on the 
meaning of these oral laws and what they imply. 

Disraeli in his Genius of Judaism, says, “The 
Gemmara was a kind of third law to elucidate the 
Mishnah which was a second law and which had 
thrown the first law, the law of Moses into ob- 
scurity.” 

The Talmud contained a little of everything, 
history, science, theology, ethics, medicine, juris- 
prudence and casuistry. “The reader,” says Dean, 
Milman, “hesitates whether to admire the pro- 
found allegorical truth and the pleasing moral 
apologue, to smile at the monstrous extravagance, 
or to shudder at the daring blasphemy. To the 
Jew the Talmud became the magic circle within 
which the national mind patiently labored for 
ages in performing the bidding of the ancient and 
mighty enchantress who drew the sacred line be- 
yond which it might not venture to pass.” The 
Talmud in laying down a minute code for all the 
affairs of life accentuated the necessity of sepa- 
rateness on the part of the Jews from other Gen- 
tiles. The religion of Talmud with its traditions 
mandatory and prohibitory laws with many mod- 


122 The World’s Greatest Classic 

ern Jews has largely been substituted for the re- 
ligion of their Scriptures. 

But what of the future of these unique people? 
There are magnificent prophecies regarding them 
which still seem to await fulfillment. How are 
they to be fulfilled? It would be unwise to at- 
tempt to say until God by His providence shall 
make their meaning plain in the facts of history. 

It was the writer’s unspeakable privilege in 
1900 to visit Palestine. 

“Those fields 

Over whose acres walked those blessed feet 
Which nineteen centuries ago were nailed 
For our advantage on the bitter cross.” 

We traveled by carriage from Jaffa to Jeru- 
salem thence to Hebron. We rode on horseback 
from Jerusalem to Damascus, visiting all the chief 
places rendered forever memorable by their hal- 
lowed associations. 

There was no place that we visited where the 
scene was more pathetic than on Friday after- 
noon at the wailing place of the Jews. There a 
large number of persons from all lands, for it 
was the Passover week, representing wealth and 
poverty, who, out of well-worn Hebrew Bibles, 
read the Lamentations of Jeremiah and the Sev- 
enty-ninth Psalm. We saw many of them with 
tears running down their faces pat with their hands 


The Most JVortderful People of All History 123 

the stones in the wall and then kiss them. Many 
Jews return to Jerusalem in old age that their 
ashes may repose in the sacred soil of Palestine. 

Thank God we live in an age of tolerance and 
mutual forbearance when men can admire and 
love their fellowmen no matter how widely they 
may differ from them in religious creed. 

Who could estimate the blessings which the 
Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, 
the Beatitudes and the Lord’s Prayer have be- 
stowed upon man? 

Our Lord wept for them and with His dying 
breath, prayed “Father forgive them for they 
know not what they do.” 

In this land of freedom, where the Jews have 
now dwelt for two hundred and fifty years, let Jew 
and Gentile by their mutual kindness hasten the 
time when love, pure as the angels and unselfish 
as God’s shall unite the whole human family into 
one great brotherhood. 


IX 


THE DREAM OF PILATE’S WIFE 

On the memorable morning that Jesus was ar- 
raigned before the tribunal of Pilate, then Gov- 
ernor of the Province of Judea, during the prog- 
ress of the trial, he received this message from 
his wife, — “Have thou nothing to do with that 
just man for I have suffered many things this day 
in a dream because of him.” 

Dreams are mental facts which can be as fully 
and as clearly substantiated as any other facts 
in the realm of mind. Philosophers who have 
made the attributes and functions of the human 
mind a special study are agreed on two points, 
first, that dreams occur in partial sleep, and then 
that whatever knowledge a man is capable of ac- 
quiring during his waking hours may be communi- 
cated to him in a dream. In perfectly sound 
sleep while the vital functions — respiration, cir- 
culation, secretion go on apparently in full force, 
the bodily senses are suspended and we have no 
consciousness of mental activity. In superficial 
sleep the bodily senses are but partially suspended 
and there is a certain amount of mental activity 
124 


The Dream of Pilate 7 s Wife 125 

of which we are more or less conscious at the 
time and of which we have a more or less subse- 
quent remembrance. While the predisposing 
causes of dreams are diverse as a rule they are 
referable to some peculiar condition of the body 
or mind. Dr. Noah Porter in his interesting 
work on “The Human Intellect” cites the case 
of Dr. Gregory who stated that on applying a 
bottle of hot water to his feet in retiring to rest 
he dreamed that he was walking up Mount Etna 
and found the ground insufferably hot. Dr. Reid 
relates that having fallen asleep with a blister on 
his head, he dreamed that he had been scalped by 
a party of Indians. A man is likely to dream 
about that on which his thoughts are most occu- 
pied. 

Benjamin Franklin assured Cabanis, a French 
physician and philosophic writer, that he often 
saw into the bearings of political events in dreams 
which he could not understand when awake. Sam- 
uel T. Coleridge, the poet and philosopher, tells 
us that on one occasion, while reading he fell 
asleep in his chair and during that sleep which 
lasted about three hours, he dreamed his famous 
poem “Kubla Khan.” So distinctly was the whole 
poem impressed upon his mind that when he 
awoke he seized his pen and wrote it down and 
gave it to the world just as he dreamed it. Un- 
fortunately he was called away before he had re- 


126 The World’s Greatest Classic 

duced it all to writing, and when he returned after 
an hour’s interruption the balance had vanished 
from his recollection, consequently, the poem as 
we possess it is incomplete. 

While it is true that the great majority of 
dreams are foolish and unmeaning, still many of 
the wisest and best men of every age agree that 
some dreams are supernatural, sent by God to 
warn, instruct, encourage or comfort men. 

There are two things stated in the Bible in re- 
gard to dreams. The first is that God expressly 
commanded the Jews to put to death any man who 
professed to utter a prophetic dream, when that 
dream tended to lead the people to idolatry. The 
second thing is that God sometimes does reveal 
His purpose and will to men in dreams. He thus 
spoke to Abraham, to Jacob, to Joseph, to Pha- 
raoh, to Solomon, to Nebuchadnezzar, to David 
and to many others both in the Old and the New 
Testament. When we weigh the proofs that Jesus 
was the Messiah we are accustomed to trace the 
lines of prophecy from the first recorded promise 
down through the ages which preceded His ad- 
vent until they converge and meet their fulfill- 
ment in His life; we point to His transcendent 
miracles, we recite the testimony of His disciples 
who were eye-witnesses of His life, death, resur- 
rection and glorious ascension. But how seldom 


127 


The Dream of Pilate’ s Wife 

do we lay any stress on the testimony of His ene- 
mies. Take a few such testimonies. After Judas 
had betrayed our Lord, smitten by remorse, he 
went to the priests and dashed the thirty pieces 
of silver, the price of his treachery, on the tes- 
sellated floor of the council chamber, exclaiming 
“I have betrayed the innocent blood.” 

After Pilate had carefully examined the charges 
against Jesus and had a private interview with 
him, he declared to his accusers, “I find no fault 
in him at all.” Here is the betrayer and judicial 
murderer of Jesus both publicly declaring their 
belief in His innocence. I need not stop to show 
the importance to be attached to the unsolicited 
testimony of enemies. To all this add the warn- 
ing testimony of this Roman woman, “Have thou 
nothing to do with this just man.” 

What powerful forces cooperated and strength- 
ened each other to prevent Pilate from participat- 
ing in this judicial murder. 

There was his judgment. Jesus was arraigned 
before him on definite charges. He was charged 
by Hi& enemies with being guilty of sedition. 
Pilate examined this charge and dismissed it be- 
cause it was utterly unsupported by any proof. 
Then he examined the charge of kingship and dis- 
missed it for the same reason. After two pri- 
vate conversations with the sinless prisoner, so 


128 The World's Greatest Classic 

thoroughly was he convinced of His absolute in- 
nocence that he expostulated with His accusers 
and declared that he could find no fault in Him. 

Such is the power of one man to read the se- 
crets of another’s soul, that the trained lawyer 
whose powers of discernment have been sharp- 
ened by experience can tell whether the witness 
he is examining is telling the truth or not. There 
is something in the eye; something in the coun- 
tenance, a subtle influence that passes from one 
mind to another, which enables the examiner of 
a witness to look into the very recesses of his 
soul and see the honesty or dishonesty that may 
be there. 

Pilate, a governor, a judge, a man of wide and 
varied experience and large acquaintance with hu- 
man nature had examined Jesus and publicly de- 
clared that there was no grounds for condemning 
Him. 

There again was his conscience. This faculty 
in the breast of Pilate was true in its loyalty to 
the right. Before him in the person of Jesus 
stood injured innocence. His conscience told 
him so. But he goes contrary to his judgment, 
stifles the warning voice of conscience because he 
feared that doing right might result in the loss 
of office. He sent for water and washed his 
hands before the multitude, saying, “I am inno- 
cent of the blood of this just person; see ye to 


The Dream of Pilate* s Wife 129 

it.” But no washing of his hands could cleanse 
them. “All the perfumes of Arabia will not 
sweeten” that hand. 

The third thing was wifely influence. When his 
judgment was convinced and his conscience was 
warning him, then came the timely message of his 
wife pleading with him: “Have thou nothing to 
do with that just man for I have suffered many 
things in a dream because of him.” 

The great lesson here taught is that man is 
his own destroyer. What powerful forces God 
brought to bear upon this Roman judge to keep 
him from participating in the most colossal crime 
of history, — a mind fully persuaded by over- 
whelming proof of the innocence of Jesus; a con- 
science which protested against the enormous 
crime of condemning the innocent to the crudest 
of deaths, and the earnest entreaties of his own 
wife. 

We sometimes talk of the destructive forces 
latent in the elements of the earth carrying in her 
own bowels the fires which might be used at any 
moment to consume her. But what are these 
unthinking forces compared with the possibilities 
lodged in man’s nature. It is possible for man 
to thwart those plans of salvation, which required 
Infinite wisdom to devise and taxed Infinite love 
to execute, to banish the Holy Spirit from the 
sphere of his life, and against the desire of God, 


130 The World’s Greatest Classic 

go down to eternal destruction. The charge the 
Son of God brings against the impenitent is “Ye 
will not come unto me that ye may have life.” 

Three dreams are recorded in the gospels as 
having been given to save Jesus from murder. 
The first was given to the wise men who came 
under the guidance of a star from the far east 
to see Him. After they had presented their offer- 
ings and adorations at His cradle God instructed 
them in a dream not to return to King Herod, 
as he had requested them, but to go back to their 
country another way. 

The second case is that of Joseph, to whom an 
angel appeared in a dream and instructed him to 
take Mary and the infant Jesus and flee into the 
Land of Egypt and remain there until he should 
receive permission to leave. And this dream to 
Pilate’s wife. 

No one doubts the fact that instruction and 
warning were sometimes given to men in Bible 
times through dreams. The question naturally 
arises, is instruction or warning ever furnished 
men now through this same channel? 

Let me cite a case which Dr. Bushnell relates 
among other in his work entitled “Nature and 
the Supernatural” and for the truth of which he 
vouches. Appreciating the fact that the recital of 
the cases he furnishes might be regarded as an 
evidence of mental weakness and credulity, he 


The Dream of Pilate’s Wife 13 1 

says, “Enough that, consciously to myself, it re- 
quires a much stronger balance of equilibrium and 
a much firmer intellectual justice, saying nothing 
of the necessary courage to report these facts, 
without any protestations of dissent or discredit, 
than it would be to toss them by with derision, 
in compliance with the more conventional notions 
and correct judgment of the times. I shall there- 
fore dare to report as true facts which neither 
I nor anybody else has even so much as a toler- 
able show of reason for denying or treating with 
lightness.’’ 

The case which he relates is this: Captain 
Yount, who had resided in California for forty 
years and had accumulated large wealth, in a mid- 
winter night had a dream in which he saw what 
appeared to be a company of immigrants arrested 
by the snows of the mountains and rapidly perish- 
ing by cold and hunger. He noted the very cast 
of the scenery, marked by a huge perpendicular 
white rock cliff. He saw the men cutting off what 
appeared to be tree tops, rising out of the deep 
gulfs of snow; he distinguished the very features 
of the persons and the look of their particular dis- 
tress. He awoke profoundly impressed with the 
distinctness and apparent reality of his dream. At 
length he fell asleep and dreamed exactly the same 
dream. In the morning he could not expel it from 
his mind. Falling in shortly with an old hunter 


132 The World’s Greatest Classic 

comrade, he told him the story and was only the 
more deeply impressed by his recognizing with- 
out hesitation the scenery of the dream. This 
comrade had come over the Sierra by the Carson 
Valley Pass and declared that a spot in the Pass 
answered exactly to his description. By this state- 
ment Captain Yount was decided. He immedi- 
ately collected a company of men with mules and 
all necessary provisions. The neighbors laughed 
the meanwhile at his superstitious credulity. “No 
matter,” he said, “I am able to do this and I will, 
for I verily believe that the fact is according to 
my dream.” The men were sent to the moun- 
tains, one hundred and fifty miles away, directly 
to the Carson Pass and there they found the com- 
pany in exactly the condition in which they ap- 
peared in his dream. The names of the persons 
and their residences were furnished Dr. Bushnell 
during a visit to the Pacific coast, and the people 
in that region bore testimony to the truth of these 
facts. 

“God speaketh once,” Job says, “yea twice, 
though men regardeth it not. In a dream, in a 
vision of the night, when deep sleep falleth upon 
men in slumbering upon the bed; then he openeth 
the ears of men and sealeth their instruction.” 

Pilate’s wife says, “I have suffered many things 
in a dream because of him.” What did she suffer ? 
Was the veil of secrecy which conceals futurity 


133 


The Dream of Pilate’s Wife 

from mortal eyes withdrawn and did she see the 
unacted history of her husband down to its close? 
A little while after the Crucifixion, according to 
tradition, Pilate was deposed from office, banished 
by the Emperor to Vienna, where reduced to the 
utmost poverty and worn out by remorse he com- 
mitted suicide. Did this wife see her husband 
stripped of his official position, disgraced, ban- 
ished from Rome, reduced to poverty, crazed by 
remorse and at last commit suicide? Did she 
see the preternatural phenomena that attended 
the Crucifixion, and was her womanly heart 
touched with the torture and sufferings of the in- 
nocent victim? Did she see all the horrors which 
accompanied the siege of Jerusalem when Titus 
moistened its red hot ashes with the blood of its 
citizens? Was the scenery of the eternal world 
disclosed to her and did she see Christ seated on 
His judgment seat in glory? The silence of the 
Scriptures is sometimes both instructive and im- 
pressive. God alone knows what the things were 
which she suffered, but they were great enough 
for her to dispatch a message to her husband 
warning him and pleading with him to have no 
hand in that deed which has gained for him an in- 
famous immortality. 


X 


THE BLACKEST CRIME OF HISTORY 

Few men, even among those most notorious for 
wickedness, have been so utterly reprobate, so 
completely lost to moral uprightness, as to ex- 
hibit no commendable qualities. Great virtues 
may exist side by side with great vices. It is 
said of Robespierre, who during the latter part of 
his public career, seemed to take a savage delight 
in shedding blood, and who walked through it to 
accomplish his ends, that he was once so sensitive 
to the sufferings of his fellow men, and so much 
opposed to capital punishment that he resigned a 
lucrative office sooner than condemn a culprit to 
the scaffold. Even Nero, whose cruelties defy 
description and who reveled with fiendish delight 
in the sufferings of others, is said to have been 
mild and amiable in youth. The beginning of his 
reign was distinguished by many acts of kindness, 
and so averse was he to inflicting pain that when 
on one occasion being called upon to subscribe to 
a death warrant, he burst into tears, and with re- 
luctance gave his signature. And so Judas, con- 
cerning whom the universal judgment is one of 
134 


The Blackest Crime of History 135 

unmitigated condemnation, as guilty of the most 
unprovoked and the blackest crime of history, 
once had a reputation for morality and piety. 
This reputation was, in all probability, as great 
as any other of the disciples, so that his call to 
the apostolic office appeared neither unfit in itself, 
nor strange to others. We are not to look upon 
him as the chosen scapegoat of humanity, as one 
appointed by an eternal and immutable decree to 
this fearful work and therefore in the grip of an 
invisible and relentless power from which he could 
not escape, and which hurried him on to his ter- 
rible destiny. This would change a free agent 
into a machine and strip human conduct of all 
moral significance. It is the fact that while 
under the most benign influence, prompted by 
the basest of motives, he deliberately planned 
and carried into effect the betrayal of his Master, 
that stamps his conduct as the most infamous and 
atrocious on record. 

The first question that meets us in examining 
the character of Judas, who is one of the darkest 
riddles of history, is: What were the motives 
which induced him to publicly identify himself 
with Christ as one of His apostles? Why was 
he willing to face the public odium which such a 
step involved, a step which the upright Nicodemus 
had not the moral courage to undertake? Was 
he at first impelled by honest convictions of the 


136 The World's Greatest Classic 

sacredness of Christ’s mission? — or was he drawn 
by purely selfish and mercenary ends ? Of course, 
no one would for a minute suppose that Judas 
sought a position among the immediate followers 
of Christ with the fixed and deliberate intention 
of securing His destruction. The thought of such 
an act at this time was as far from his conscious 
determination as from any other of his disciples. 
Had Jesus, who knew from the beginning who 
should betray Him, held up a truthful picture of 
that black, accursed and awful tragedy and 
showed Judas the terrible part that he would 
play in it, the indignant reply would have been: 
“Is Thy servant a dog that he should do this 
great thing?” 

I believe that a careful examination of every- 
thing recorded of Judas would show that he at- 
tached himself to Jesus under the conviction that 
he was about to establish an earthly kingdom and 
his supreme desire was to share in the worldly 
exaltation which he believed his new Master 
would soon attain. It is true the other disciples 
believed that Jesus was about to break the Roman 
yoke and reestablish the kingdom of Israel in all 
its former glory and they desired to share in the 
honors of His reign. But their supreme and 
only hope was not, as in the case of Judas, one 
of purely worldly gain. 

Take that incident related in the sixth chapter 


The Blackest Crime of History 137 

of John, which seems to have marked a turning 
point in the history of Judas. The connection 
is this: When Jesus performed the miracle of 
multiplying the loaves and fishes, the effect upon 
the multitude was such that they attempted to 
take Him by force and make Him King. If, as 
some suppose, the disciples headed this move- 
ment, doubtless Judas, as the object was entirely 
in harmony with his desires, took a prominent 
part. Jesus, however, withdrew out of their 
midst, and on the next day preached in the syna- 
gogue at Capernaum to the same multitude, in 
which He utterly blasted all merely worldly ex- 
pectations concerning Himself. “From that time, 
many of His disciples went back and walked no 
more with Him.” As he saw the disappointed 
multitude forsaking Him, He turned to the twelve 
and said: “Will ye go away also?” Peter re- 
sponded: “Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou 
hast the words of eternal life. And we believe 
and are sure that Thou art that Christ the Son of 
the living God.” How did Christ answer this 
noble declaration of Peter? Very strangely in- 
deed. He said: “Have I not chosen you twelve 
and yet one of you is a devil?” Why at this 
particular juncture, a year before the end of His 
ministry, did the character of Judas in all its false- 
ness and baseness rise up before the mind of 
Christ? Was it not because at this particular 


13 8 The World’s Greatest Classic 

juncture when all temporal advantages had been 
dashed to the ground and the other disciples had 
avowed their belief in His divine Sonship, that 
Judas consciously rejected Him although he de- 
termined still to remain among his disciples? As 
Christ knew the workings of his heart and now 
perceived that he was a conscious hypocrite ca- 
pable of committing the blackest and most infa- 
mous crime of history His indignation was aroused 
and He said “Have not I chosen you twelve and 
one of you is a devil?” 

What terrible deeds have men done for the 
sake of money! When inflamed with a passion 
for its possession have they hesitated at any crime 
however atrocious? Have they not trampled on 
every principle of equity divine and human, deso- 
lated homes, depopulated countries and through 
the shrieks and groans of their dying fellow beings 
marched on unmoved to their coveted object? 

The same passion which reigned in the breast of 
Judas with such overmastering tyranny and damn- 
ing desperation, is still abroad in the world, ex- 
erting its fearful influence over the lives of men. 
Has not its potent influence been seen and felt 
in legislative halls? Has it not sometimes entered 
courts of justice and defeated the very ends for 
which they exist? How often have men allowed 
avarice to destroy their peace, blight their char- 


The Blackest Crime of History 139 

acters, blast their reputations and ruin their eter- 
nal hopes. 

Judas furnishes a striking illustration of the 
power of immediate gain to blind men to results 
and consequences. The thirty pieces of silver 
which he received were equivalent to a little more 
than fifteen dollars. Do you suppose that Judas 
put the terrible deed that he was about to commit 
before his mind in its true light? Did he say to 
himself: I am about to violate the most sacred 
ties of friendship and to betray into the hands of 
his relentless enemies, one whom I know to be 
holy and innocent, and whose life and powers 
have been unsparingly used for the temporal and 
eternal good of others. But innocent and good 
though He be, I would rather see Him scourged 
and crucified and have His blood resting on my 
soul than lose these thirty pieces of silver. No ! 
No ! When men are bent on obtaining coveted 
ends, they do not wish to look at their conduct 
from its proper moral standpoint and see what 
may be the consequences. It is conceivable that 
Judas, while seeking opportunity to carry out his 
part of the horrible stipulation, tried to persuade 
himself that Christ in the end would suffer no harm 
from His enemies, as He could, with infinite ease, 
free Himself from their control. When a man be- 
gins to tamper with conscience and becomes the 


140 The World's Greatest Classic 

apologist of wrong-doing in himself, he is stand- 
ing on a moral quagmire. 

But retribution came. No sooner had Judas re- 
ceived the wages of his irreparable treachery than 
the character of Christ rose before him, sublimer 
and more beautiful than he had ever perceived it, 
to condemn and harrow his soul with the agonies 
of unbearable remorse. The silver lost its luster 
and every piece seemed to charge him with shed- 
ding innocent blood, until he was crazed by re- 
morse. No man, unless his conscience has been 
seared, or paralyzed, ever deliberately betrayed 
truth, cowardly yielding principle to expediency, 
maligned the innocent, or stood silent and allowed 
the innocent to suffer when he ought to have 
spoken, who has not sooner or later suffered the 
penalty in the merited contempt of the noble, or 
in conscious meanness and unmanliness, or in 
secret remorse and regret that lay like a weight 
of ice upon his heart. 

The manner and mode of Judas was character- 
istically base. He committed suicide. Now this 
is the most contemptible act a human being is 
capable of committing. It is an attempt to es- 
cape from the burdens and responsibilities of life, 
leaving these burdens for somebody else to bear, 
increased by a legacy of shame. Judas hung him- 
self. There is only one other instance as far as 
I am aware in the Bible of hanging and that was 


The Blackest Crime of History 14 1 

a man, who in the principal act of his life was 
the prototype of Judas — Ahithophel, the friend 
and counselor of David, betrayed the king as 
Judas did Christ and then hung himself. 

Dante, in his vision of Hell, puts Judas in the 
lowest circle at the very bottom of the pit in a 
lake of ice with Satan himself. He is in a posi- 
tion of torture. His head in Satan’s mouth, be- 
ing torn by his teeth as a ponderous engine. Such 
was the medieval conception of the crime and the 
punishment of the man. Peter says he went to 
his own place. 

No one can think too deeply of his sins, but he 
can think too exclusively of them, and if he does, 
it will drive him to despair. Judas dies without 
pardon and went to his own place without hope, 
not because his sin was too great for forgiveness 
but because he did not seek it. There is only 
one unpardonable sin and that refusing to seek the 
pardon that covers all sin. ‘‘Whosoever cometh 
unto me,” says the risen and crowned Savior, “I 
will in no wise cast out.” 


XI 


THE QUEEN OF SHEBA 

One of the most interesting episodes of Solo- 
mon’s reign was the visit of the Queen of Sheba. 
That this incident has secured a place in the pages 
of inspired history, that it was deemed of sufficient 
importance for our Lord to make mention of it a 
thousand years after its occurrence, that it still 
lives in the traditions and legends of nations, in- 
vests it with peculiar interest. 

Who was this Queen? What was the name of 
her country? Tradition has given her the name 
of Balkis. Josephus says that she was Queen of 
Ethiopia. But it is now almost universally held 
that her country was in the southwestern part of 
Arabia, that region which lies on the eastern shore 
of the Red Sea, which in ancient times was known 
as Sabea, which in more recent times was called 
Arabia-Felix, — which is now known as Yemen. 
This region in contrast with other portions of 
Arabia has always been distinguished for its 
beauty, fertility, mineral wealth, perfumes and 
spices. 

Reports had reached this Sabaean queen of the 

142 


143 


The Queen of Sheba 

wisdom, wealth, power, glory and magnificence of 
Solomon. Nor were these reports unfounded. 
Jerusalem was at this time the center of great 
political influence and colossal wealth. All the 
surrounding nations were either tributary to Solo- 
mon or in friendly alliance with him. This en- 
abled him to carry on an extensive commerce 
both by land and by sea. He built in Syria the 
magnificent city of Tadmor, afterwards called 
Palmyra, in an oasis in the desert for the purpose 
of securing an interest in and command over cara- 
van traffic with Babylon and the Far East. He 
formed a navy manned mostly by Phoenician sail- 
ors, and his vessels sailed westward over the Medi 
terranean Sea as far as the Straits of Gibraltar; 
and also from the head of the Dead Sea to the 
golden regions of the Far East. From southern 
Spain, Africa, India and Arabia his vessels re- 
turned ladened with gold, silver, ivory, spices, 
apes, peacocks, the costly, the strange and the 
curious of other lands. Egypt supplied him with 
horses and chariots. “Forty millions of dollars’ 
worth of gold alone was received by Solomon in 
a year,” says Dr. Crosby, “and we cannot put the 
purchasing value of that at less than $400,000,000. 
Such enormous wealth no king or nation has ever 
seen before or since Solomon.” 

His first public work and his greatest architec- 
tural achievement was the building of the temple. 


144 


The World’s Greatest Classic 


Nearly two hundred thousand workmen as stone 
cutters in quarries, hewers of wood in Lebanon, 
and burden bearers were engaged between three 
and four years in collecting materials for that 
structure. The stones were so cut and fitted that 
they were put together without clink of trowel or 
stroke of hammer. For seven years that massive 
structure on the summit of Moriah silently rose 
into its proportions of strength and beauty. 

“No workman’s steel, no ponderous axes rung, 
Like some tall palm the noiseless fabric sprung.” 

All that the genius of the King could devise or art 
execute or wealth purchase were expended on that 
temple. His palace and the archway which con- 
nected it with the temple were marvels of splen- 
dor. Solomon was exceptionally endowed with 
wisdom. For this he had specially prayed and 
the fame of his wisdom had extended among all 
the surrounding nations. He was noted for his 
botanical and zoological knowledge as well as his 
knowledge of the art of government. He was the 
author of three thousand proverbs and a thou- 
sand and five songs. 

The visit of this Sabaean queen was made dur- 
ing the first half of his reign, while as yet he sus- 
tained the character of a religious man, a great 
statesman and a wondrously wise king. She must 
have been a woman of unusual powers of mind 


The Queen of Sheba 14 5 

and great independence of character, a woman 
whose soul was cast in a heroic mould or she would 
have been dismayed at the distance, difficulties 
and perils which in that age and land confronted 
her when she thought of undertaking this journey. 
It necessitated her to travel in going and coming 
about three thousand miles and with the facilities 
at her command for traveling would occupy be- 
tween four and five months. Much of her journey 
lay through desert wastes and waterless rocky ra- 
vines. She traveled a part of the way through 
the same region that Moses led the Israelites on 
their journey from Egypt to Canaan. How great 
must the fame of Solomon’s wisdom have been 
and how strong must the yearnings of this queen’s 
soul for knowledge have been for her to have 
accomplished a journey beset with such difficulties 
and involving so long an absence from her king- 
dom ! Her visit, the great train of camels which 
she brought with her, bearing gold, precious stones 
and spices lived long in the memory and tradi- 
tions of the Jerusalemites. She was received by 
Solomon with all the honor due to her character 
and station. “She came to prove him with hard 
questions.” The wisdom of the East was largely 
enshrined in proverbs. The test of wisdom was 
the solution of riddles and the explication of dark 
sayings. There is nothing at least impossible in 
the legends as to the nature of some of the ques- 


146 The World 1 s Greatest Classic 

tions which she propounded. One of her tests 
was to dress a company of boys and girls alike and 
then ask Solomon to tell which were the boys and 
which were the girls. The King ordered basins 
of water to be brought in and then bade them wash 
their hands. The boys from habit dipped their 
hands at once into the water while the girls stopped 
to roll back their sleeves. She then held up two 
bouquets of flowers, one artificial and the other 
real and bade the King without leaving his throne 
to tell which were the real and which were the 
artificial. He ordered some bees to be let in 
and they rested on the real flowers. She set down 
a goblet and requested him to fill it with water 
taken neither from the earth nor drawn from the 
clouds. A huge slave was set up on a spirited 
steed and galloped him to and fro until he was in 
a perspiration and then from the torrents of per- 
spiration which ran off of him the goblet was 
filled. 

When she had witnessed the dexterity of his 
wisdom, the facility with which he solved the most 
intricate problems, she communed with him of all 
that was in her heart, and he answered all her 
questions to her satisfaction. He showed her his 
palace with its courts and porches and the other 
great architectural ornaments of his capitol. 
When she saw him seated upon his unrivaled lion 
throne of gold and ivory, dispensing justice and 


The Queen of Sheba 147 

witnessed his gorgeously attired retinue of minis- 
ters and servants, the profusion of golden vessels 
that adorned the banquet table, the distinguished 
ambassadors who came from all lands to pay 
homage to him and listen to his wisdom, the 
splendor with which he rode out in his Egyptian 
chariot surrounded by his bodyguard there was 
“no more spirit left in her.” She said, “It was a 
true report which I heard in mine own land of 
thine acts and of thine wisdom; howbeit I believed 
not their words until I came and mine eyes had 
seen it; and behold the one-half of the greatness 
of thy wisdom was not told me; for thou exceed- 
est the fame that I heard. Happy are thy men 
and happy are these thy servants which stand con- 
tinually before thee and hear thy wisdom.” 

There is no station in life from the lowest to 
the loftiest which has not been filled by woman. 
Such women as Zenobia of Palmyra, Catherine 
of Russia, Elizabeth of England, Isabella of 
Spain, Maria Theresa of Austria have graced the 
thrones upon which they have sat and added lus- 
ter to the countries over which they have ruled. 
Was not Deborah as truly a Judge in Israel in 
her day as was Samuel in his day? What general 
ever created greater confidence and enthusiasm 
in the hearts of soldiers on the eve of battle 
when the odds were against them than Joan 
of Arc? 


14S The IVorld’s Greatest Classic 

The chief superiority of Balkis over the most of 
her sex at that period did not consist in the fact of 
her brilliant and lofty official station as Queen 
of Sheba. The record centers the whole interest 
in the woman herself, in the breadth of her views, 
in the grasp of her mind, in the cravings and as- 
pirations of her soul. She had probably mastered 
the learning of her own country, fathomed the 
depths of Arabian philosophy and found it in- 
capable of satisfying the deep cravings of her 
higher nature. When a fair chance has been ac- 
corded woman she has taken a high rank in the 
realm of intellect. At the most brilliant period 
of Athens’ history, when Pericles was at the head 
of affairs, it is now freely admitted that many of 
the schemes which secured him fame as a states- 
man were suggested by the gifted, brilliant and 
much misrepresented Aspasia, who even num- 
bered Socrates among her friends and admirers. 
It has been said that no women could have written 
Homer’s “Iliad,” or Bacon’s “Novum Organum,” 
or Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” or portrayed 
the character of Othello as Shakespeare has done. 
It has also been said that no man could have writ- 
ten Madame De Stael’s “Corinne,” or George 
Eliot’s “Adam Bede.” From the time of Balkis 
in Sheba and Aspasia in Athens to the present 
hour when much of the elementary education of 
the youth of this land is in the hands of women 


The Queen of Sheba 149 

she has been making contributions to the mental 
treasures of the world. 

But the supreme object of this visit on the part 
of Balkis may not have been simply for the grati- 
fication of an intellectual appetite for knowledge 
in general. Would not the brief Biblical record 
suggest a higher motive? She “heard of the fame 
of Solomon concerning the Lord,” therefore “she 
came to prove him with hard questions.” Doubt- 
less among these questions were questions which 
had reference to the character of the true God, 
the nature of the soul and the relation of Jehovah 
to Israel. For when about to return to her own 
land, she said to Solomon, “Blessed be the Lord 
thy God which delighted in thee, to set thee on 
the throne of Israel; because the Lord loved 
Israel for ever therefore made he thee king to 
do judgment and justice.” This visit ended with 
the interchange of costly and magnificent gifts 
and the queen returned to her own country. 

Our Lord used the visit of this queen to rebuke 
and warn the men of His day. “The queen of 
the south shall rise up in the judgment with this 
generation and condemn it; for she came from the 
uttermost parts of the earth to hear the wisdom 
of Solomon; and behold a greater than Solomon is 
here.” How superior are the advantages of this 
generation to the advantages of Balkis, or even 
of Israel in the time of our Lord. 


XII 


LIFE A CONTINUOUS BATTLE 

One great fact which biological research has 
brought to light and accentuates, is that this world 
is now and always has been a scene of constant 
conflict among all the forms of life to be found 
upon its surface. The plants that grow beneath 
our feet, the trees that clothe and beautify the 
landscape are engaged in silent rivalry. “Left 
to themselves they fight out, as unmistakable rec- 
ords have shown, a stubborn struggle extending 
over centuries in which” at last only “those forms 
most suitable to the conditions of the locality re- 
tain their place.” 

Among the microscopic forms of life which 
people a drop of water and float in the sunbeam, 
too small to be seen by the naked eye, the same 
struggle is going on. In their battle for the prize 
of life how many countless multitudes perish. 
Pass into the sphere of human life and look at 
the difficulties which confront a babe when it lands 
on the shores of time and commences the struggle 
for earthly existence. Every child is born practi- 
cally blind, deaf, dumb and unable to walk. Its 
150 


Life a Continuous B\attle 15 1 

organs of vision have gradually to become accus- 
tomed to the light before it can see. Certain 
readjustments have to take place in the ear be- 
fore waves of sound can pass through it to the 
brain. The power of speech is gradually acquired 
and the ability to walk, by slow degrees attained. 
How numerous too are the forms of disease to 
which it is heir and which challenges its right to 
life. Is success in this battle a matter of course? 
Is it not estimated that one-third of the human 
race die in infancy? 

When you rise to a higher level with its wider 
outlook the same truth is evident. Even the 
men who step into the arena of life fitted by na- 
ture, training and inclination for its duties and 
with all their powers and energies apparently 
under their control, are not always victorious. 
It is not every man who starts out in life with the 
determination to attain eminence at any price, to 
make money at any cost, and who in the pursuit 
of these things is ready to stifle conscience, dis- 
regard the counsels of God and sacrifice true man- 
liness, who reaches his desired goal and secures 
his coveted prize. When Napoleon was a young 
artillery officer just beginning to attract atten- 
tion, the Assembly of France, alarmed that a mob 
thirty thousand strong was approaching for the 
purpose of turning them out of doors and over- 
throwing the government, was induced to send 


152 The World's Greatest Classu 

for him. As he stood before the Assembly the 
President, after surveying him for a moment 
with the feeling that the safety of France rested 
upon the shoulders of this young officer whose 
shrunken form and pale face gave no indication 
of the military genius and boundless ambition 
that were just beginning to burn within him, said: 
“Young man, can you protect this Assembly?” 
the stern lips of the young Corsican parted to 
reply: “I always do what I undertake.” Writers 
have invested the name of Napoleon with a glam- 
our that has hid real facts from view. Unques- 
tionably he was a great genius but utterly desti- 
tute of principle. He was a man of colossal sel- 
fishness, boundless ambition and tireless energy — 
traits, however, possessed by Satan himself. He 
was a continental robber who walked through 
blood and broken oaths to the throne of France. 
This young Corsican rising from obscurity to be 
the Emperor of France, the most dreaded per- 
sonage in Europe, is often pointed out as a typi- 
cal instance of success. But was he successful? 
Was he not whipped, mercilessly whipped, in the 
battle of life along the lines which he chose to 
fight it? Was he not dethroned, shorn of all 
power? And did he not become a premature, 
querulous, old man who spent the last days of his 
life a prisoner in exile, whining over the indigni- 
ties to which he regarded himself as subjected? 


i53 


Life a Continuous Battle 

The higher you ascend in any department of 
life, the fewer do the classes become. There are 
more thistles than Yosemite pines or cedars of 
Lebanon. There are more ants than eagles. 
There are more men who can read and write and 
cipher than can call the stars by name and meas- 
ure their orbits, paint a Madonna, build a Par- 
thenon, write an epic. So, in the Christian life, 
the smaller the classes become the higher you rise. 
There are few Pauls, Chrysostoms, Augustines, 
Luthers, Knoxes, epochmaking men, who counted 
not their lives dear unto them so they might fin- 
ish the work given them to do and testify to the 
gospel of the grace of God. The first great truth 
which demands recognition, a truth whose roots 
run through all forms of life, is that the Chris- 
tian life is a fight and he who would mold his inner 
thoughts and outward actions by the principles of 
the Gospel must accept it as such. 

In this fight the dangers which beset each life 
are special, so that what may be a powerful temp- 
tation to one man may be no temptation to an- 
other — the reef on which your friend was hope- 
lessly wrecked, the sandbar on which your neigh- 
bor was helplessly stranded, may not endanger 
your safety because you are sailing in another di- 
rection. There are men whose integrity money 
could not buy, in whose keeping uncounted mil- 
lions would be absolutely safe, but there are men 


154 The World's Greatest Classic 

who will betray trust, destroy character, blast 
reputation, ruin friends, risk earthly liberty and 
peril their souls for its possession. 

No one questions the law and power of hered- 
ity. Physical resemblances, mental capacities and 
moral biases are transmissible and sometimes 
travel down family and national lines for gen- 
erations and centuries. A Jew is a Jew whether 
in Russia, Poland, Germany, France, England, 
or America, possessing well-defined features and 
traits which differentiate him from men of other 
nations. This is not said with any disrespect for 
that people, to whom the world is more indebted 
than to any other people, for our blessed Savior 
was a Jew. 

The history of the house of Stuart is a strik- 
ing illustration of inherited and transmissible vi- 
cious qualities. Mary, Queen of Scots, was a beau- 
tiful woman, fascinating and bewitching in her 
manner. Through her mother she descended 
from the base house of Guise in France, a house 
noted for lust, cruelty, bigotry, contempt of 
truth and love of merciless revenge. These bad 
qualities she inherited and was herself sensual, 
cruel and treacherous. Pass down the line of her 
descendants : James I, Charles I, Charles II, and 
James II, and the virus of cruelty, lust, bigotry, 
tyranny and absolute unreliability runs with in- 
creasing virulence, inflicting unbearable miseries 


i55 


Life a Continuous Buttle 

upon the nation until, in self-protection, it banished 
them from the throne. Although a man may in- 
herit tainted blood and receive a legacy of disabili- 
ties from his progenitors that does not relieve him 
of responsibility. It will make the battle harder. 
No matter where my blood comes from, when it 
pours through my arteries and flows through my 
veins it is mine. If it be heated with the passions 
and poisoned with the dregs of another life, my 
duty is to calm and cool and purify it. 

It is easier to live a Christian life in some 
places than others. It was more difficult for 
Daniel to be a devout and holy man in Babylon 
than it would have been in Jerusalem. John 
Stuart Mill was carefully trained in childhood by 
his father in the principles of atheism. Young 
Mill had no voice in determining the character of 
his childhood instruction. Did that fact relieve 
the future philosopher of responsibility in adher- 
ing to and teaching others the principles of 
atheism through life? Your greatest peril may 
lie wrapped up in some providential event which 
you had no direct influence in shaping, an event 
which you cannot avoid, or push aside, but which 
you must meet and grapple with. 

The Christian’s life is not only a fight, but it is 
a good fight. It is implied that victory is pos- 
sible for all men who live up to the light which 
they possess. It is possible for men to subjugate 


156 The World’s Greatest Classic 

wrong constitutional biases, rise superior to dis- 
advantageous environments, or else they would 
not be commanded to fight. 

That God and all the holy forces of the spirit- 
ual universe are on the side of the man who is 
struggling to preserve his purity, eradicate the 
evil that is in him and overcome the wrong that 
is without him, is a truth taught with increasing 
clearness from Eden to Calvary and from Cal- 
vary to the present time. What are some of the 
qualities which are necessary to enable us in this 
battle to so fight that at last we can say without 
egotism : “I have fought a good fight, I have kept 
the faith,” and hear our Lord and Master say in 
response: “Well done, good and faithful servant, 
enter into the joy of thy Lord.” 

We need vigilance. “What I say unto you,” 
said our Lord to His disciples, “I say unto all, 
watch.” No man who needlessly and deliberately 
exposes himself to temptation in the presence of 
which he is weak has any more right to expect 
God to shield him from moral harm than he would 
if he flung himself from a beetling crag, have a 
right to expect the law of gravity to be suspended 
to protect him from physical injury. Judas should 
never have accepted the treasurership of the apos- 
tolic band. He should have said, “Brethren, ex- 
cuse me. I know myself better than you. There 
is Peter and John, either of them will make an 


Life a Continuous Battle 157 

excellent choice.” As our Lord has taught us to 
pray “Lead us not into temptation,” instead of 
exposing our weakest points to be raked by the 
fires of our great adversary, we are to avoid temp- 
tation whenever and wherever we can consistently 
with duty. 

This battle demands courage. The mass of 
men in all ages and in all lands are timid, sel- 
fish, cowardly, afraid to strike evils which they 
know and feel to be evils because such action 
would call for energy, imperil self-interest and 
demand sacrifice. Turn to the pages of history, 
sacred and secular, or look out on the world of 
living men along any line, social, religious, mu- 
nicipal, national, and you will find that great re- 
forms are ordinarily started by some one person 
whose soul is cast in a heroic mould, encounter- 
ing that evil at first single-handed in the face of 
the opposition of the timid. How much does the 
world owe to the firmness and courage of Luther, 
when before the Diet of Worms, he refused to re- 
tract the principles and truths which gave birth 
to the Reformation! The emancipation of four 
million slaves in this land is one of the greatest 
events of its history. Did not the movement 
which resulted in that national act begin with Gar- 
rison? In his opening address to the public in the 
first number of the Liberator, he said: “I will be 
harsh as truth and uncompromising as justice. I 


158 The World's Greatest Classic 

am in earnest; I will not equivocate; I will not 
retreat an inch and I will be heard.” What scorn 
and bitter opposition had he to bear in the early 
stages of this battle for the right from the timid, 
selfish, timeserving masses of men! Emerson’s 
conception of a hero is a man who “taking both 
reputation and life in hand, will with perfect ur- 
banity dare the gibbet and the mob by the abso- 
lute truth of his speech and the rectitude of his be- 
havior.” There are men who without the quiver 
of a muscle, or the tremor of a nerve, could face, 
or have faced death on the battlefield, who have 
not the courage of their own deepest convictions. 
They know and believe the gospel to be true, but 
they have not the courage in the midst of Christ- 
less associates and before the world to confess 
their allegiance to Christ and thus make His life 
the model of their own. 

This battle calls for earnestness. There is no 
quality of character more communicable or con- 
tagious than earnestness. When Demosthenes 
felt the liberties of Greece were being assailed by 
Philip, and Patrick Henry felt England was 
trampling on the rights of the colonies, and 
Daniel Webster felt that the perpetuity of the 
Union was imperiled, were not these great ora- 
tors able to pour their enthusiasm into the hearts 
of their countrymen until the most phlegmatic 


Life a Continuous Rattle 159 

throbbed with passion and were ready to defend 
those liberties with the last drop of their blood? 
Are not the issues of life of sufficient magnitude 
and importance to cause us to discharge its duties 
with deep earnestness? What a power one ear- 
nest man is ! A few Christians shook the Roman 
Empire. We pass through this world but once 
and even if we are permitted to fill up the allotted 
period of man upon the earth, that time is too 
short not to crowd its days with noble thoughts 
and seize all its opportunities for doing good as 
golden. The shortest life may be made sublime 
for: 

“We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not 
breaths; 

In feelings, not in figures on a dial. 

We should count time by heart-throbs. He most 
lives 

Who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best.” 

“Put on the whole armor of God, that ye may be 
able to stand against the wiles of the devil.” In 
this battle you fight in good company, the patri- 
archs, prophets, apostles, martyrs and good of 
all ages make up the goodly company. Angels 
are your associates. “Are they not all ministering 
spirits sent forth to minister to them who shall be 
heirs of salvation?” You fight for a good cause 
— the overthrow of all wickedness and the en- 


160 The W or Id's Greatest Classic 

thronement of truth and righteousness every- 
where. You fight under a grand leader. Jesus 
is the Great Captain of our salvation. 

Look at the grandeur of what is at stake. Eter- 
nal life. “Lay hold on eternal life.” Eternal life 
here does not mean simply never ending existence. 
It has reference to quality of life. Our Lord says : 
“This is eternal life, that they may know thee, 
the only true God and Jesus Christ whom thou 
hast sent.” “He that hath the Son hath life.” 
Eternal life is begun in the believer here and is 
perfected in heaven. Men’s conceptions of 
heaven are often colored by their experiences here. 
Robert Hall was in his time one of the most elo- 
quent men in England. It was said of him by 
Dr. Parr, a contemporary and competent critic, 
that, “he had the eloquence of an orator, the fancy 
of a poet, the acuteness of a schoolman, the pro- 
foundness of a philosopher and the piety of a 
saint.” He was a great sufferer, never free from 
pain and often prepared his sermons when suffer- 
ing bodily torture. It is said that on one occasion 
when talking with the Statesman William Wilber- 
force on the unseen world, he said to Wilber- 
force : “What is your idea of heaven?” Mr. Wil- 
berforce replied: “My idea of heaven, Mr. Hall, 
is love, love. What is your idea?” “My idea 
of heaven,” replied Mr. Hall, “is rest, rest.” 
When Paul thought of the eternal future of the 


Life a Continuous Battle 161 

children of God, of their co-heirship with Christ, 
he exclaimed: “The sufferings of this present 
time are not worthy to be compared with the 
glory which shall be revealed to us.” John de- 
clares that although now we are the sons of God 
— “It is not yet manifest what we shall be”; that 
is, there has never yet been set before the eyes 
of men in this world what the actual condition of 
the sons of God is to be in another life. While 
there is great mystery here, yet hints are given 
us in the Scriptures from which much can be 
legitimately inferred. It is true the most positive 
affirmations are negations. “There is no more 
curse there.” “There is no night there.” “And 
there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor cry- 
ing, neither shall there be any more pain; for the 
former things are passed away.” An imperfect 
and momentary glimpse of human nature is given 
us in the transfiguration scene, when Moses and 
Elijah stood with Jesus on one of the spurs of 
Hermon, when His countenance blazed like the 
sun and His raiment was dazzling white like the 
snow which covered the surrounding mountain 
peaks. But after all, these are only far-off hints 
of the perfection and completeness of those who 
have passed into the immediate presence of Christ 
and who now with direct, clear and certain vision 
behold His glory and are made like Him. 
“Father, I will that they whom Thou hast given 


1 62 The World’s Greatest Classic 

me may be with me where I am that they may 
behold my glory.” This prayer previous to His 
departure is followed by the promise subsequent 
to His enthronement: “To him that overcometh 
will I grant to sit with me on My throne even as 
I also overcame and am set down with My Father 
on His throne.” It was clear-eyed faith, the as- 
sured hope of eternal life, the glorious expecta- 
tion of sharing with Christ in the regal splendors 
of heaven that enabled Tennyson at the close of 
a long and distinguished career to sing with his 
latest breath : 

“Sunset and evening star 
And one clear call for me ! 

And may there be no moaning at the bar 
When I put out to sea.” 

“But such a tide as moving seems asleep, 

Too full for sound or foam, 

When that which drew from out the boundless 
deep 

Turns again home.” 

“Twilight and evening bell, 

And after that the dark! 

And may there be no sadness of farewell 
When I embark.” 

“For tho from out our bourne of Time and Place 
The flood may bear me far, 

I hope to see my Pilot face to face 
When I have crossed the bar,” 


XIII 


THE SIGNIFICANCE AND DESIGN OF 
THE TRANSFIGURATION 

A unique and unparalleled episode in our 
Lord’s life is the transfiguration. It is the only 
recorded visible manifestation of his Godhead in 
the Gospels. 

Where did this marvelous scene take place? 
Ecclesiastical tradition has identified Mount 
Tabor as the scene of the transfiguration and be- 
fore the close of the sixth century three churches 
corresponding to the three tabernacles which 
Peter proposed to make were erected upon its 
summit in commemoration of this event. But an 
insuperable objection against the correctness of 
this traditional locality is the fact, as Dr. Robin- 
son in his Biblical Researches shows, that long be- 
fore and long after the time of our Lord’s minis- 
try the summit of Tabor was occupied by a forti- 
fied city and would not have afforded the isolation 
and quiet required by the Gospel narratives. 
Therefore, if for no other reason Tabor must be 
set aside and we must associate it with some peak 
of Mount Hermon in the neighborhood of Cae- 
163 


164 The World’s Greatest Classic 

sarea Philippi. Dr. Porter who examined the to- 
pography on the spot says, “Standing amid the 
ruins of Caesarea, we do not need to ask what 
that high mountain is. The lofty ridge of Her- 
mon rises above us and probably on one or other 
of those wooded peaks above us that wondrous 
event took place.” Dean Stanley says, “It is 
impossible to look from the plain to the tower- 
ing peaks of Hermon and not be struck with its 
appropriateness to the scene.” 

Jesus, taking Peter, James and John ascended 
some one of the southern peaks of Hermon 
towards evening for the purpose of spending the 
night in communion with his Father. Long after 
darkness had settled down on the little company 
and the disciples had become sleepy and with 
difficulty kept themselves awake Jesus continued 
to pray. And as he prayed a sudden and most 
wonderful change took place in His whole appear- 
ance. The fashion of His countenance was al- 
tered, it became supernaturally bright; until it 
blazed like the sun in his splendor, and His rai- 
ment grew white and dazzling as the snow which 
crowned the surrounding mountain peaks. It was 
the rays of His Godhead bursting through the 
veil of His humanity and disclosing for a moment 
a glimpse of that glory which He had in Himself. 
To add to the splendor and impressiveness of the 
scene two visitants from the spirit world clad 


Significance and Design of Transfiguration 165 

in robes of Celestial brightness appeared and en- 
tered into conversation with Him on the very sub- 
ject which He had talked with His disciples be- 
fore He ascended the Mount — “His decease 
which he should accomplish at Jerusalem.” How 
these disciples knew that these two personages 
were Moses and Elijah, whether by special revela- 
tion or by having Jesus call them by name we are 
not informed. As Peter gazed on this scene of 
supernal grandeur, such as mortal eye never wit- 
nessed before and never will witness again until 
Jesus shall return in the clouds accompanied by 
a countless retinue of angels. As he saw his 
Master standing the central figure of that group, 
His raiment as if woven of light, gleaming and 
flashing like lightning, and His face shining like 
the sun, awestruck, feeling that he must say some- 
thing, yet hardly knowing what he did say ex- 
claimed “Lord it is good for us to be here; if 
thou wilt let us make three tabernacles, one for 
thee, one for Moses and one for Elijah.” While 
he was speaking a luminous cloud as brilliantly 
bright as if it embosomed a sun in its folds, 
floated near them and enveloped and over-cano- 
pied them. As the cloud enveloped them Moses 
and Elijah vanished and a voice came from an un- 
seen speaker in the cloud saying, “This is my be- 
loved Son, hear Him.” Terror stricken the three 
disciples prostrated themselves on the ground and 


1 66 The World’s Greatest Classic 

hid their faces and so remained until Jesus 
touched them and said, “Arise, be not afraid.” 
When they raised their eyes and looked around 
them the cloud had vanished, Moses and Elijah 
had departed, the supernatural glory had passed 
from the countenance and raiment of Jesus and 
they were with Him alone on the mountain top 
under a starlit sky. 

What was the meaning and the design of this 
extraordinary incident in the life of our Lord? 
What significance had it for Jesus Himself? What 
was it intended to teach His immediate disciples? 
What was it designed to teach us and the Church 
for all time? Considered with reference to Jesus 
Himself it was designed to sustain Him in the 
awful hour of Gethsemane’s agony and Calvary’s 
darkness, which were then in the immediate fu- 
ture. This memorable incident furnished three 
distinct aids to His faith. The first was a fore- 
taste of the glory which should be His after His 
work on Calvary was accomplished. Heaven 
came down upon that mountain top and He was 
for a moment reinvested with the glory which He 
had before the world was. It was a momentary 
anticipatory fulfillment of His prayer, “O Father 
glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory 
which I had with thee before the world was.” 

The second source of comfort was that if His 


Significance and Design of Transfiguration 167 

mission and the means by which it was to be ac- 
complished were not understood on earth they 
were comprehended by the saints in heaven. The 
presence of Moses the founder of the Hebrew 
Commonwealth, and Elijah the reformer, the one 
the representative of the law and the other of 
the prophets, was designed to show that their 
work was in harmony with and preparatory to 
the Kingdom which Jesus came to establish. The 
presence of these two representatives of the old 
economy conversing with the transfigured Jesus 
about His approaching death was designed to 
show that He was the Fulfiller of the law and the 
prophets and that the Mosaic Economy having 
served its purpose should now give way to the 
grander dispensation of Christianity. 

The third thing was the audible voice of His 
Father giving His approval. As the cloud over- 
shadowed them Moses and Elijah vanished, leav- 
ing Jesus alone the object of undivided attention, 
then came the Voice of the Eternal Father, say- 
ing, “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well 
pleased; hear Him.” 

This is one of three occasions on which God 
the Father spoke in audible voice to His son 
during His ministerial career. The first occasion 
was on the banks of the Jordan at His baptism 
when by that rite He assumed the sinner’s place 


1 68 The World's Greatest Classic 

and undertook to fulfill all righteousness, there 
came a voice from heaven saying, “Thou art my 
beloved Son; in Thee I am well pleased.’’ The 
last occasion was when near the close of His life 
as the shadow of the cross fell athwart His path- 
way His sinless spirit became momentarily de- 
pressed when He prayed, “Father save me from 
this hour; but for this cause came I unto this 
hour. Father glorify thy name.” Then we read 
there came a voice from heaven saying, “I have 
both glorified it” that is by your life, “and I will 
glorify it again” that is by your death. These 
three audible utterances from heaven served one 
end. Spoken at crises in the life of Jesus when 
he had exhibited His determination to finish the 
work given Him to do no matter what humilia- 
tion and sufferings it might involve they audibly 
express the Father’s approval of His obedient 
spirit. 

What did the transfiguration teach the imme- 
diate disciples? 

During the sojourn of Jesus and His disciples 
at Caesarea Philippi He asked them who they 
thought He was. The reply of Peter was, “Thou 
art Christ the Son of the Living God.” When 
Jesus followed this great confession with the as- 
surance that He must suffer an ignominious 
death at the hands of the rulers they were so sur- 
prised and shocked at such a statement that Peter 


Significance and Design of Transfiguration 169 

remonstrated with Him for harboring such a 
thought and said, “This shall never be done unto 
Thee.” The transfiguration scene helped these 
disciples to reconcile the consistency of the death 
of Jesus on the cross and His divinity. The sight 
of Moses and Elijah conversing with Him about 
His approaching death made a powerful and last- 
ing impression on their minds and enabled them 
subsequently to understand more fully the mys- 
tery of the cross and the majesty of its victim. 
Near the close of Peter’s life we find him in one 
of his epistles referring to this scene as a proof 
of the truth of Christianity. He wrote, “We have 
not followed cunningly devised fables when we 
made known unto you the power and coming of 
our Lord Jesus Christ but were eye witnesses of 
His majesty. For He received from God honor 
and glory when there came to Him a voice from 
the excellent glory — This is my beloved Son in 
whom I am well pleased. And this voice which 
came from heaven we heard when we were with 
Him in the holy mount.” 

But what does this glorious incident teach you 
and me amid the duties, successes and disappoint- 
ments of life? 

To the question of the patriarch Job, “If a 
man die shall he live again?” it answers, yes, 
there is a future life. Mr. John Fiske has summed 
up his views of the teachings of that philosophy 


170 The World's Greatest Classic 

which denies the immortality of the soul in these 
words, “The materialistic assumption that there 
is no future life and that the life of the soul 
ends with the life of the body is perhaps the most 
colossal instance of baseless assumption that is 
known to the history of philosophy.” Then he 
adds, “For my own part I believe in the immor- 
tality of the soul not in the sense in which I ac- 
cept the demonstrable truths of science, but as a 
supreme act of faith in the reasonableness of 
God’s work.” 

But here the fact is proved to the sense by the 
reappearance of two distinguished prophets cen- 
turies after their departure out of the world. 
Fifteen hundred years had ebbed and flowed since 
Moses ascended Neboh to die; and a thousand 
years had passed away since Elijah went up to 
heaven in a chariot of fire. Although fifty gen- 
erations of men had come and gone since they 
lived and acted their eventful part in the great 
drama of history — there they stood, the same 
Moses who led the Children of Israel to the bor- 
der of the promised land — the same Elijah whose 
stern denunciations of idolatry brought besotted 
Israel to repentance, talking with Jesus. 

Although suddenly they came out of the some- 
where and as suddenly passed into the unseen their 
presence there teaches us the great truth that men 


Significance and Design of Transfiguration 17 1 

continue to live in conscious activity after they 
pass out of this world through the avenue of 
death. 

The transfiguration scene flashes light on the 
fact that the friends of earth will know each 
other in the eternal world. When Moses and 
Elijah appeared in conversation with Jesus the 
disciples distinguished Moses from Elijah. Is it 
not fair to suppose that Moses and Elijah knew 
each other? 

It is in accordance with the implications of 
Scripture and in harmony with reason to believe 
that when a child of God enters heaven instead 
of finding himself a stranger among strangers he 
is welcomed to the presence of Jesus and the so- 
ciety of the redeemed by those whom he knew, 
loved and labored with on earth in the cause of 
truth and righteousness. u We shall! not only 
recognize old friends and form new acquaintances 
among the saints of other ages and countries 
but we shall become familiar acquaintances and 
companions with angels, those ancient, wise and 
holy servants of God.” 

The fact that the transfiguration took place 
while Jesus was engaged in prayer should not be 
overlooked. If the Son of God who had no sins to 
confess and no forgiveness to ask found it neces- 
sary to pause in the holiest employment and seek 


172 The World's Greatest Classic 

the seclusion of the mountain for the purpose of 
communion with His Father what a necessity is 
prayer for us. 

What does the transfiguration teach the Church 
of God for all time? 

The Eternal Father in audible voice makes an- 
swer, “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well 
pleased; hear ye Him.” And what does Jesus 
say? His command is, “Believe the Gospel.” 
The Gospel, the glorious Gospel of the blessed 
God, which hath abolished death and brought 
life and immortality to light exhibits the unsearch- 
able wisdom, the omnipotent power taxed to its 
utmost and the infinite love of Almighty God pro- 
viding a plan for man’s salvation which fills an- 
gels with wonder. The soul has no needs and no 
aspirations which it cannot satisfy. It alone 
teaches that unselfishness of which Jesus is the 
example and the inspirer, which will remedy all 
the evils which menace society now or in any age. 
It is the teacher and defender of all those vir- 
tues which result in religious freedom and politi- 
cal liberty. 

The command of Jesus is to preach this gos- 
pel. We agree with Dr. Roswell Hitchcock even 
if we feel condemned by the criticism, when he 
says, “The great weakness of the ministry in our 
day comes from a neglect of the Bible. It is not 
half enough studied. Our sermons are not satu- 


Significance and Design of Transfiguration 173 

rated as they should be with the Scriptures.” If we 
plunged our intellects into its depths and sent 
our emotions up into its heights we would have 
less shallowness, poverty and platitudes in our 
preaching. What a mighty gift the power of mas- 
terful speech is when it has behind it a trained 
intellect and the accumulated treasures of scholar- 
ship ! Even such a man as Peter the Hermit by 
the power of speech in the middle ages aroused 
the nations of Europe to undertake the Crusades, 
which arrested the advance of Mohammedan 
power and led to the destruction of feudalism, the 
growth of commerce, the spread of literature and 
greater refinement of manners — results so great 
as to change the intellectual, social and moral as- 
pect of Europe. 

“Go into all the world and preach the gospel 
to every creature” was the parting injunction of 
the ascending Lord. When men shall believe the 
truths He taught, incarnate the principles He laid 
down, obey the precepts He enjoined and trust 
the promises He made, lay their hearts against 
His loving, bleeding heart and walk in His foot- 
steps then will their lives be transfigured and 
shine with some of His supernal luster. 


XIV 


AFTER DEATH— WHAT? 

The condition of the dead between the time of 
their departure out of this world to the future 
resurrection is for many and various reasons a 
subject of profound interest to every thoughtful 
mind. For centuries upon centuries the children 
of this world have been marching forward, a 
great unbroken procession into the shadows which 
curtain the spirit world. In less than half a cen- 
tury a number equal to the present population of 
the whole earth will have crossed that gulf which 
separates the seen from the unseen. The dead 
is a vast uncountable multitude, infinitely out- 
numbering the living. In that company there are 
some whom we have all known personally and 
who were dear to us. We know that no matter 
even if human life should be extended to its ut- 
most limit we too shall soon join them. There- 
fore, something more than mere curiosity, the dic- 
tates of reason, continued interest in and abiding 
love for the departed lead us to seek all the light 
we can on the condition of the dead during the 
174 


After Death — What? 175 

period which intervenes between death and the 
resurrection. 

While the disclosures of Revelation are not as 
full and explicit on this subject as on the circum- 
stances attending the Second Coming of our 
Lord, the Resurrection and the Final Judgment, 
or sufficiently full and clear to justify us in mak- 
ing dogmatic statements in regard to the present 
abode of the dead and the precise nature of their 
occupation, still, considerable light has been shed 
upon it. 

Let us take a few of the more important pas- 
sages in the New Testament, bearing on the mid- 
dle state, and briefly examine what they teach 
both by explicit affirmation or legitimate infer- 
ence. Take the parable of the rich man and 
Lazarus, as found in the sixteenth chapter of 
Luke. In this parable our Lord lifts the curtain 
of the spirit-world and shows us Abraham, Laz- 
arus and the rich man there. In the Greek of 
the New Testament there are two different words, 
namely, Hades and Gehenna, which the trans- 
lators of the authorized version of the Bible have 
rendered by the one English word “hell,” but 
which have been rendered in the revised edition 
correctly by the two words — Hades and hell. 
When our Lord in His Sermon on the Mount says, 
Matthew 5 129 — “If thy right eye offend thee, 
pluck it out and cast it from thee ; for it is profi- 


176 The World’s Greatest Classic 

table for thee that one of thy members should 
perish and not that thy whole body should be 
cast into hell” — the word hell here is Gehenna 
and means the place of the punishment of lost 
souls. When it is said in the parable “In hell 
he lifted up his eyes” — the word “hell” in the 
original is “Hades.” The word “Hades” is used 
eleven times in the New Testament and is equiv- 
alent to the Hebrew word Sheol, which is used 
sixty-five times in the Old Testament. Hades or 
Sheol is the term used in the Scriptures for the 
invisible world, the spirit-world, that world into 
which all human beings good and bad pass imme- 
diately after death. The teaching of the Scrip- 
tures is that this unseen spirit world is divided 
into two separate regions, one called “Paradise,” 
or Abraham’s bosom where the good are; the 
other, called “Gehenna” or “hell” in the modern 
definite sense of a place of punishment. These 
two regions are separated by a gulf which is im- 
passable, as impassable to the inhabitants of the 
spirit-world as is the space between us and the 
planet Mars to an inhabitant of this world. There 
are five things which this parable teaches with 
unequivocal clearness relative to the middle state : 
first, the self-consciousness and personal activity 
of men after death ; second, the survival of mem- 
ory which links their lives in the spirit world with 
this world; third, their continued interest in 


After Death — What? 177 

those whom they loved in this world; fourth, their 
recognition of friends in the spirit world; fifth, 
their condition of happiness or misery was unal- 
terably fixed. 

Take our Lord’s answer to the dying thief — 
“To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise.” 
When Jesus expired both He and the robber went 
to Hades — to Paradise in Hades. “The word 
Heaven is never used in the Old Testament to 
designated the place or condition to which be- 
lievers are introduced at death. It is never used 
as if the subject designated sustained any rela- 
tion to man’s future destiny. It always desig- 
nates the dwelling place of God.” Old Testament 
believers contemplated death with sadness and 
shrinking because they regarded Hades as a re- 
gion of gloom and life there as a ghost life. Heze- 
kiah may be said largely to voice their sentiments 
on this point when after his prayer to be saved 
from death was heardj he said, Isaiah 38:13; 
“Sheol cannot praise thee; death cannot celebrate 
thee ; they that go down into the pit cannot hope 
for thy truth. The living, the living shall praise 
thee, as I do this day.” The death of Christ on 
the cross accomplished a work for the departed 
saints who waited for Him in Paradise, as well 
as for those who were in the flesh. What to them 
up to this time was a glorious hope now became a 
glorious reality. “The entrance of Christ into 


178 The World’s Greatest Classic 

the abode of the blessed must have revolutionized 
them. Indeed, it is a significant fact that these 
abodes of the blessed dead, whatever may have 
been their locality were never called ‘heaven’ in 
the language of inspiration until after this great 
crisis wrought in the spirit-world by the entrance 
of the God-man.” “When on the evening of Fri- 
day the soul of the then dead Christ personally 
united forever to His divinity, entered Paradise, 
He must have irradiated it with a sudden light — 
never seen there nor in all the Universe of God 
before. That one moment consummated heaven 
and revolutionized the condition of the redeemed 
forever. How much more, then, when some forty 
days afterward, in His complete person, His risen 
and glorified body united to His glorious soul 
and Godhead, He ascended and sat down on the 
right hand of the Majesty on high must the seats 
of the blessed have been transformed and glori- 
fied forever, and made the central temple, and 
cosmopolitan eye and crown of the universe 1” 
The legitimate inference that may be drawn 
from the teaching of Scripture is that Christ not 
only changed the condition but also the location 
of Old Testament saints. Previous to His res- 
urrection Hades was always spoken of as down; 
but since His ascension the place of the redeemed 
is called heaven and is spoken of as up. The 
redeemed at death now no longer go to Paradise, 


179 


After Death — What? 

the upper region in Hades, but to heaven. Heaven 
is where God permanently manifests His glory, 
as He nowhere else does. The presence of 
Christ is the chief feature of heaven to the re- 
deemed. Take another passage bearing on the 
middle state. In the opening verses of the fifth 
chapter of second Corinthians Paul says, “For 
we know that if our earthly house of this taber- 
nacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, 
a house not made with hands eternal in the 
heavens. . . . Therefore we are always confi- 
dent, knowing that whilst we are at home in the 
body we are absent from the Lord” and we are 
“willing rather to be absent from the body and to 
be present with the Lord.” There is a double con- 
trast in this passage, a contrast between life in 
this body and life out of this body; life in this 
world away from Christ and life in heaven with 
Christ. 

Now what do these passages which I have 
cited teach of the present condition of the blessed 
dead? They teach that up until the resurrection 
of Christ all human beings at death passed into 
Hades, which consisted of two places, namely, 
Paradise and Gehenna or Hell, in the present re- 
stricted sense of that word as a place of punish- 
ment. They teach that the inhabitants of Hades 
retain a recollection of their lives in this world, 
are interested in their friends whom they left be- 


180 The World* s Greatest Classic 

hind here, recognize their friends in the spirit 
world who either preceded them or follow them, 
and are in a state of either happiness or misery. 
They teach that during the interval between the 
death of Jesus on the cross and His resurrection, 
He went to Paradise in Hades, where all departed 
believers under the Old Testament dispensation, 
awaited His coming. Peter said in his Pente- 
costal sermon, Acts 2 127, that the promise and 
prediction recorded in Ps. 16:10, “thou will not 
leave my soul in Hades, neither wilt thou suffer 
thy Holy One to see corruption” were fulfilled 
in Him. He changed their condition from Para- 
dise to Heaven. Heaven is that place in the 
Universe where God permanently, in unveiled 
splendor, manifests His glory and where the 
glorified Godman is. The presence of Christ is 
the essential feature of heaven for His redeemed 
people. “Blessed are the dead” — dead only as 
to their bodies, for he that believeth hath eter- 
nal life and shall never die — “which die in the 
Lord.” To “die in the Lord” implies the ac- 
ceptance of Christ as our Savior from the guilt 
and dominion of sin, vital union with Him as 
evidenced by the testimony of a holy life. 

Death brings immense gain and unalloyed bliss 
to the redeemed, for four reasons clearly affirmed 
in the Word of God. By His death and resurrec- 
tion Christ opened heaven to His people. First, 


After Death — What ? 181 

at death they do immediately pass into glory to 
be with Christ. His promise is “Let not your 
heart be troubled. I go to prepare a place for 
you. Where I am there shall ye be also.” If 
the language of the Scriptures which describe 
heaven as a city with jasper walls, gates of pearl 
and streets of gold, a city lighted and illumined by 
the visible presence of God be figurative, still 
the splendor of the imagery intimates the surpass- 
ing glory of the reality. 

Second, at death the redeemed are introduced 
into the society and companionship of the Good 
of all lands and of all ages, from Enoch who 
walked with God and Abraham the friend of 
God, to the present time. The inhabitants of 
heaven constitute one family in which there are 
no jealousies, no hurtful rivalries, where love, 
pure as the angels and unselfish as God’s unite 
all minds and all hearts in perfect accord. 

Third, at death the redeemed are not only de- 
livered from all sin and further exposure to temp- 
tation and are made perfect in holiness, but from 
everything that would mar and shadow perfect 
happiness. There is no hunger, no thirst, no pain, 
no sorrow, no crying, no death in heaven. All 
cause for heart aches and tears are removed for- 
ever. 

Death is blessedness to the redeemed because 
of the immense enlargement of knowledge which 


182 


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it brings. Could I take a man born blind to some 
lofty eminence where a magnificent landscape was 
visible and by some Omnific power remove that 
congenital blindness, so that mountains and 
meadows, rivers and lakes, land and sea and sky 
would burst upon his vision, what a sudden im- 
mense increase of knowledge that would bring 
to him. Could I retain him there until the sun 
sank to rest and he was overcanopied by the bril- 
liant starlit dome of night, what wonderfully 
new and enlarged ideas of material creation he 
would receive ! How many centuries it has taken 
men to attain unto our present knowledge of the 
facts and laws of astronomy, geology, chemis- 
try and biology! When the veil of flesh,. through 
which we now look and see the things of God only 
dimly, and often as deep unfathomable mysteries, 
is removed, how much that is now obscure will 
be made clear and how much that is now unknown 
will then be made known. “It has been finely 
said, one angel’s history may be a volume of more 
precious truth than all the records of our race.” 
And “volume after volume of such truth, the 
glorified redeemed are permitted to scan.” 

On this side of the grave, 

“Timorous mortals start and shrink 
To cross the narrow sea; 

And linger shivering on the brink 
And fear to launch away.” 


After Death — What? 183 

But how strange it must appear to those on 
the other side that it should ever be necessary to 
prove to them that it was better to depart and be 
with Christ than to remain in this world where sin 
and sorrow are such powerful factors in human 
life. While the state and condition into which 
the redeemed pass at death far exceed in bliss 
and glory their present state, still the state and 
condition that shall follow the resurrection shall 
exceed in bliss and glory the state of believers 
now in heaven. There are three stages in the 
life of the redeemed, as Cremer says — “The be- 
ginning of eternal life in this life, the blessedness 
after death, perfection of glory in the resurrec- 
tion.” 

“The resurrection is the keystone in the proc- 
ess of realizing in us the redemption that has 
been accomplished for us.” “Let us look for 
and await that day, the great day of realities, the 
day in which this sad human world will forever 
put off its changefulness and misery and the grave 
will be plundered of its hoarded spoils, and the 
dead come forth, calmed and purified to enter into 
the happy life of heaven. That will be the vic- 
tory of victories. One battle has been fought 
and won by Christ the Lord; but the great battle 
remains, the battle in which death shall be over- 
come by his own captains, in which, not worsted 
by a sinless and perfect king, but driven in igno- 


184 The World’s Greatest Classic 

minious defeat before weak sinful men, death it- 
self will be destroyed, or we shall lay down our 
victorious arms before the Captain of our Sal- 
vation, acknowledging that arms and victory and 
glory all are His. The sting of death is sin, and 
the strength of sin is the law; but thanks be unto 
God, through Christ Jesus the Lord, we may 
victoriously encounter death, even though it be 
armed with a sting, envenomed by guilt and 
mighty with a strength drawn from our trans- 
gressions. 


XV 


THE NATURE AND OCCUPATION 
OF ANGELS 

It is difficult to follow the line of development 
in the animal kingdom, as it rises in a steadily as- 
cending scale rank above rank from the lowest 
form of life until we reach man, without having 
the presumption awakened that there must be 
other intelligences above man outranking him 
in the range of their powers and the scope of 
their knowledge, as much as he outstrips the high- 
est order of the brute creation. When, there- 
fore, the Bible reveals the existence of angels — 
a celestial family — it reveals something in har- 
mony with the analogy of nature as well as a fact 
grateful to our faith. The Scriptures not only 
reveal the existence of angels, but instruct us as 
to their nature and employment. They are al- 
ways represented as having appeared to men in 
bodies in human form, and there is no intimation, 
not a scintilla of evidence, in the Word of God 
that these bodies were simply assumed for the 
occasion and then laid aside again. Of course 
their bodies are not gross matter subject to the 
185 


1 86 The World's Greatest Classic 

same laws which condition our bodies, for while 
angels walked and talked and ate with men, they 
have power on their missions from God to this 
world, of rendering themselves visible and then 
instantly vanishing from sight at will. 

Whatever may be the greatness of their intel- 
lectual powers or the vastness of their knowledge, 
they are not omniscient. The perfections of God, 
the wisdom of His purposes and the infinitude of 
His plans along the various lines of Divine activ- 
ity, are gradually unfolded to them. The knowl- 
edge which they possess has been gradually ac- 
quired by the use of the faculties with which they 
are endowed. 

Take the declaration of Peter when he speaks 
of “the things the angels desire to look into.” 
The word “look” literally means to stoop down, 
to bend over, for the purpose of carefully ex- 
amining a thing so as to see through it. The 
word “desire” means to long for, to covet. What 
are the things in this world on which the atten- 
tion of angels is riveted, over which they bend, 
which they earnestly study and strongly desire 
to comprehend? Is it the majesty of our moun- 
tains, the mightiness of our oceans, the vastness 
of our continents, the varied and endless forms of 
beauty with which God has adorned this planet? 
Is it man’s progress in science and literature, in 
the elements of intellectual ennoblement and re- 


The Nature and Occupation of Angels 187 

finement, in the construction of railroads and tele- 
graphs, in the spread of commerce and the ac- 
cumulation of riches? The things of which the 
apostle speaks are things revealed through the 
prophets, which the prophets themselves did not 
comprehend — namely, salvation, — both in what it 
involves, the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ 
and redemption of man through the blood of the 
Cross; and in what flows from it, the exaltation 
and honor it confers upon man, and the new light 
it sheds upon the character and attributes of 
God. 

Why do angels desire to search into the work 
of God for human salvation in this world? 

The answer is because God in the gospel scheme 
of Redemption exhibits Himself to them in a 
new light, in a light previously unknown. Previ- 
ous to the disclosure of the scheme of Redemption 
there were four aspects under which God had pre- 
sented Himself to the contemplation of angels. 
They knew Him as Creator. When they saw the 
countless orbs and mighty systems which had been 
fashioned by His creative fiat, and heard nature’s 
music as these “morning stars sang together,” 
then they as “sons of God shouted for joy.” 

They had also known him as the Preserver and 
upholder of the Universe. As they saw all things 
from the atom to the orb, from the animalcule to 
the archangel sustained and guided by His Al- 


1 88 The World’s Greatest Classic 

mighty Hand they cried one to another, “Holy, 
holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts.” God had ex- 
hibited Himself to them as a moral Governor 
who had placed all created intelligences under 
law and required of them absolute obedience. 

They had also seen God in His character as 
Judge, punishing lawlessness, for some of their 
associates guilty of disobedience had been expelled 
from heaven, doomed to eternal degradation and 
misery. But in the gospel scheme of redemption 
the character of God appeared to them in an as- 
pect previously unknown. He appeared not only 
as Creator, Preserver, Ruler and Judge, but also 
as Savior. The new attribute which now mani- 
fested itself was mercy, — that is, favor extended 
to the undeserving. Angels saw God manifest- 
ing for lawless human rebels infinite love and 
paternal solicitude. What an amazing spectacle, 
of condescension and love on the part of the God- 
head, to angels that was when they saw the second 
person of the Godhead come to this world and 
take human nature into eternal wedlock with His 
Divine nature. “Without controversy great is 
the mystery of godliness. God was manifest in 
the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen of angels.” 

While the Gospel scheme of Redemption re- 
vealed to angels attributes of God of which they 
had no previous knowledge, it also exhibited those 
attributes with which they were familiar in a new 


The Nature and Occupation of Angels 189 

and more impressive light. They knew God as 
benevolent. His benevolence was clearly exhib- 
ited in the care exercised to place all creatures 
in environments best calculated to promote their 
well-being. But when they saw him loving fallen 
man with a love that redeemed him by the stu- 
pendous sacrifice of His own Son, it immensely 
heightened their conception of this feature of the 
Divine character. 

Their admiration and joy were expressed in 
that anthem which was wafted through the skies 
to human ears. “Glory to God in the highest, on 
earth peace good will to men.” 

They knew God as just, for they had witnessed 
His justice displayed in the expulsion of some of 
their fellow beings from heaven. But when they 
saw the Creator humbling Himself to become a 
man, then suffering as He suffered and dying as 
He died that justice might be maintained, and 
yet a sphere be provided in which mercy might 
work the inviolability of Divine justice must have 
blazed out before their minds in even a stronger 
light. 

Through the church God has given to angels a 
new revelation of His manifold wisdom, which in 
many ways accomplishes results created intelli- 
gences could not anticipate. Doubtless the fall 
of our race was a subject of profound interest 
to angels and of earnest discussion among them. 


190 The World’s Greatest Classic 

They may have deemed it hopelessly doomed be- 
cause they could conceive of no way by which God 
could do otherwise than cut it off. When God’s 
own plan was unveiled to them in which mercy 
puts honor upon justice and justice glorifies mercy, 
to them it flung new luster over the Divine attri- 
butes. As they rejoice in whatever tends to en- 
hance the Divine glory and crown with success 
God’s plans, they hail each sinner’s repentance 
with joy. 

We have seen that the angels are occupied in 
studying the Divine perfections, the wisdom, 
power and goodness of God as revealed along the 
lines of creation, providence and grace. Their 
joy finds expression in rapturous songs of praise. 
No matter how great their intellectual powers 
may be they admit of constant development. No 
matter how vast their knowledge and perfect 
their happiness are, they are progressive. From 
their creation to the present time they have been 
making steady advances along these lines. The 
fair presumption is that in the ages of eternity 
to come they will know many things of which 
they have now no conception. 

What is the employment of angels as far as it 
relates to men? There are five things which the 
Scriptures distinctly affirm constitute a part of 
their employment. First, they, at great epochal 
points in the history of the Church have been the 


The Nature and Occupation of Angels 191 

medium through which God communicated with 
men, and the agents of accomplishing His will. 
It was through their agency that the law was 
proclaimed at Sinai. This is affirmed by Stephen 
in his speech in 7:53 of the Acts, by Paul in 
his letter to the Galatians (3:19), and by the 
author of the Epistle to the Hebrews (2:2). 
They announced the advent of Jesus. 

Second, they are the appointed guardians of 
God’s people. This office is thus set forth in the 
Old Testament; “He shall give His angels charge 
over thee to keep thee in all thy ways.” “The 
angel of the Lord encampeth round about them 
that fear Him and delivereth them.” The same 
doctrine is taught by our Savior when he urges 
the care of angels over His people as a reason 
why the humblest of them should not be ill- 
treated; “Take heed that ye despise not one of 
these little ones ; for I say unto you that in heaven 
their angels do always behold the face of my 
Father which is in heaven.” And the inspired 
apostle says, “Are they not all ministering spirits 
sent forth to minister to them who shall be heirs 
of salvation?” No believer in the Bible can ques- 
tion the fact that the guardianship of angels is 
taught in the Scriptures. 

Angels are employed to execute judgment upon 
the enemies of God. Of Herod who killed the 
Apostle James and sought to murder Peter it is 


192 The World’s Greatest Classic 

said, “The angel of the Lord smote him and he 
was eaten of worms.” 

It is the office of angels to convey the souls 
of saints to their mansions in heaven. Our Lord 
in His parable of the rich man and Lazarus says 
that when the latter died he was carried by the 
angels into Abraham’s bosom. As angels attend 
saints in their journey through life, so they are 
present at the moment of death to conduct their 
souls to heaven. 

Angels will minister to the saints at the second 
coming of Christ and be His attendants. “He 
shall send his angels with a great sound of trumpet 
and they shall gather together His elect from the 
four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.” 

What a profoundly interesting part of the uni- 
verse is this planet of ours to angels. Each of 
the various globes throughout the whole universe 
may have a glory peculiar to itself. “Star dif- 
fereth from star in glory.” But the grand attrac- 
tive feature of this world for angels is the cross 
and the results of the cross as exhibited through 
the Church. Take such themes as the love of God 
as exhibited in the gift of His Son, the incarna- 
tion, the crucifixion, the resurrection and the as- 
cension of Christ, the coming of the Holy Spirit 
into this world, the regeneration of the human 
soul, the passage of man through the grave, his 
exaltation and brotherhood with the God-man, 


The Nature and Occupation of Angels 193 

and what themes are these to tax the powers of 
angelic intelligences and excite their admiration. 
What it is only rational to suppose is that many 
other worlds are inhabited, yet as far as we know 
this is the only world which has been the theater 
of such great events. How painful to us some- 
times is the spectacle of men shutting their eyes 
to magnificent opportunities for spiritual self- 
improvement and serviceableness among their 
fellow men; especially when we see and feel our 
helplessness to convince them of their folly. An- 
gels unseen are ministering spirits to men. As 
they see men neglecting or rejecting salvation must 
they not gaze upon them, as they are fixing their 
characters in sin and choosing a future of misery, 
with feelings akin to solicitude? 

If Redemption is a subject that challenges the 
deepest the most reverent attention of angels and 
calls forth their loftiest praise, what a profoundly 
interesting theme it should be for man. It was 
for us the plan of redemption was devised, for 
us the blood of atonement was shed, and to us 
the offer of free salvation is made. And yet, is 
it not unspeakably strange the indifference and 
neglect with which it is treated? In the days 
of our Lord’s earthly ministry He was astonished 
at the unbelief of His townsmen in rejecting Him 
in the face of evidence of miracle and truth which 
He furnished them. “We are ambassadors for 


194 The World's Greatest Classic 

Christ. As though God did beseech you by us we 
pray you in Christ’s stead be ye reconciled to 
God.” 

May not the failure of any one of us to do this 
excite the astonishment of angels? Be assured 
that if Redemption be not a joy for us on earth 
it will not be a song for us in heaven. These un- 
seen celestial visitants who hover around us are 
here to bear back to heaven the tidings of the 
victory of saving truth over human hearts. “I 
say unto you there is joy in the presence of the 
angels of God over one sinner that repenteth” is 
the declaration of our Lord Himself. 


XVI 


THE SATISFYING VISION 

In the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, that remark- 
able chapter in which the sufferings of Christ are 
so graphically foretold, and with which we are all 
so familiar, at the eleventh verse we read these 
words — “He shall see of the travail of his soul 
and shall be satisfied.” The word “travail” here 
is to be understood in the sense of toil and suffer- 
ing and the word “soul” as equivalent to life — 
so the text means, “He shall see the reward of the 
toil and suffering of his life and shall be satis- 
fied.” That Jesus is the one meant in this pas- 
sage is settled beyond question by the explanation 
which the evangelist Philip gave to the Ethiopian 
Eunuch of its meaning. As more than eighteen 
centuries have passed since this prophecy was 
changed into history, the question is, what was 
that vision which Jesus had which supported and 
comforted Him in the toils and sufferings of His 
earthly career? And what is he now seeing that 
is a sublime satisfaction and infinite compensation 
for all that he has done for sinful man? 

First of all, in the closing hours of His earthly 
195 


196 The World's Greatest Classic 

life, at the very moment of his apparent defeat 
when His enemies were filling the air with their 
jibes and their jeers, when preternatural dark- 
ness had wrapped the guilty city, which had got 
drunk on crime and was soon to vomit blood, in 
frightful gloom and the veiling of His Father’s 
face fell upon His soul, like the shadow of hell, 
He saw above and beyond these temporary events 
the completion of the most stupendous work Al- 
mighty God had ever undertaken. 

The successful completion of a great enter- 
prise is always pleasing to men. Their interest in 
it is usually in proportion to the daring of the ven- 
ture, the thought, time and energy which it de- 
mands and the splendor of the result. The late 
John Fiske has said that the nineteenth century 
has no equal in the annals of man, in the stu- 
pendous enterprises which it records as having 
been undertaken and carried to successful comple- 
tion. Among these prodigious enterprises, I think 
the laying of a cable along the bed of the Atlantic, 
thus making the ocean a whispering gallery for 
this land and the nations of Europe, enabling them 
to speak to each other and instantly be heard 
through three thousand miles of stormy seas, is 
entitled to a place. When first mentioned critics 
predicted its certain failure and for a time it 
seemed as if their prediction would prove true. 
When the first message flashed across that cable, 


The Satisfying Vision 197 

and the spirit of thunder geared and harnessed 
confessed its readiness to do man’s bidding in the 
ocean’s depths, did not the civilized world rejoice 
at the splendor of the achievement? 

But there was one man, Cyrus W. Field, who 
had spent years of anxious thought upon this 
problem and risked millions of money to solve it, 
who felt the thrill of a secret joy, an unspeakable 
satisfaction, which no one else could know. 

What, however, are any and all of the great- 
est human enterprises compared with the work 
which the Son of God undertook! He under- 
took to present to man the love of God in a light 
so wonderful that although his eyes were blinded 
by sin he could see it, and although his heart was 
hardened by transgressions he could feel it. 

There are three epochs in the biography of God 
either explicitly taught or clearly implied in the 
Sacred Scriptures, of unspeakable significance. 
The first was the creation of angels. Sweep back 
far enough through the millenniums of eternity, 
and you reach a point where God amid its awful 
solitudes dwelt alone. There came a period when 
He created the angels — those spiritual beings who 
reflect unmarred His own image. As God sur- 
veyed their happiness He found satisfaction. 

A second epoch was the creation of the ma- 
terial universe man inclusive. When the angels, 
who knew from their own nature what spiritual 


198 The World’s Greatest Classic 

substance is, saw this new revelation of Wisdom 
and Power as exhibited in the union of matter 
and force, watched the moving stars as they went 
singing in their orbits what effect had it upon 
them? Their rapture burst forth into songs of 
praise and they shouted for joy. As God Him- 
self surveyed this work He was filled with satis- 
faction and pronounced it good. 

A third epoch was that still more wondrous 
revelation when God placed Himself before the 
angels in a way which showed Fatherhood and 
Sonship and disclosed to them His purpose of 
redeeming sinful man. Christ foresaw all that 
was involved in the work which He undertook. 
When He reached the end of His earthly career 
and saw that His cross completed the greatest 
and the grandest work of the Eternal Father, saw 
that it bridged the chasm which sin had made 
between God and man, flung new glories around 
the Godhead, rendered heaven possible for man 
and would stand forever as the sublimest con- 
ceivable exhibition of love, the vision compensated 
Him. He saw of the travail of His soul and was 
satisfied. 

The vision also carried with it the satisfaction 
of a conqueror. 

Good and evil exist in other parts of the Uni- 
verse, as well as in this world — Why should God, 
who is infinite in wisdom therefore know all 


The Satisfying Vision 199 

things in their origin and sequences, who is infinite 
in power and therefore is able to prevent or 
accomplish anything He pleases, who is infinite in 
holiness and therefore abhors moral evil, stand 
back and permit sin to enter the Universe? 

This is a question philosophy has through the 
centuries discussed and theology vainly tried to 
answer. It is a mystery that has not been revealed 
and perhaps is not to us in our present state 
revealable. But it is revealed that somewhere in 
the Universe among the stars, we know not where, 
and at some point in Eternity, we know not when, 
some of the angels disobeyed. Later man dis- 
obeyed too. What a sublime picture does Isaiah, 
seven hundred years before the incarnation of 
Christ, present of His ultimate victory over evil. 
As the prophet stood on the central mountain 
region near Jerusalem looking down the Jordanic 
valley to the Dead Sea, and beyond to the moun- 
tains of Edom, he saw a stranger descend from 
Bozrah, the capital of Edom, cross the valley 
and ascend the hill on which he stood. The figure 
was heroic and majestic and moved with stately 
steps and martial bearing. As he approached the 
prophet scrutinized him and saw that his splendid 
garments were spotted with blood. In his aston- 
ishment he challenges him with the question, 
“Who is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed 
garments from Bozrah? This that is glorious in 


200 The World's Greatest Classic 

his apparel, marching in the greatness of his 
strength?’’ The response came back “I that 
speak in righteousness mighty to save.” As he 
came nearer the mysterious and awful stains on 
his clothing became more startling and the prophet 
cried out: “Wherefore art thou red in thine 
apparel and thy garments like him that treadeth 
the wine fat?” Then the great stranger gave 
him the story of the struggle and a victory. “I 
have trodden the wine press alone and of the 
peoples there was no man with me.” 

The vision teaches us the destruction of evil 
through good. On the cross Jesus saw this vision 
fulfilled. He saw that he had laid the land of 
molding power on the hearts of unborn genera- 
tions of men, saw that the instrument of his own 
torture would pass into history to become the 
symbol of all that is good, morally beautiful and 
loving among men. Then he said to the eternal 
Father, with the satisfaction of a conqueror, “I 
have finished the work which thou gavest me to 
do, now give me my reward.” “Glorify me with 
the glory which I had with thee before the world 
was.” 

Look once more at the satisfaction which Jesus 
is now receiving as He witnesses the triumphs of 
His gospel. Nowhere do we find the priceless 
worth of man so powerfully and so impressively 


The Satisfying Vision 201 

taught as in the Gospel. The worth of man can- 
not be estimated by the most precious things of 
time. Were the earth flattened out into one great 
harvest field, were every stock gold and every 
grain a diamond, it were nothing in comparison 
to the worth of a single soul. God showed His 
appreciation of its worth when He gave the great- 
est gift within the compass of his power and of 
His heart for man’s redemption. 

Jesus, with the vision of one whose eye swept 
the coming ages, said, “I, if I be lifted up” — 
first on the cross and then on the throne, “I will 
draw all men unto me.” 

What countless millions redeemed through the 
cross, created anew by the Holy Spirit after the 
image of God, have entered heaven, since Jesus 
took His seat on His mediatorial throne ! As He 
surveys this multitude which no man can number, 
engaged in the fatigueless activities of heaven, as 
He sees some in one part and some in another 
part of His boundless kingdom, all holy, happy 
in His service, with an endless future of increas- 
ing capacity of joy before them, does not the 
sight give Him satisfaction? When He turns 
from heaven to earth, walks through this world, 
sees ignorance, cruelty, crime flee before the 
teachings of the cross; when He looks down the 
ages and sees the time coming when legislation, 


202 The World's Greatest Classic 

jurisprudence, commerce and social intercourse 
shall be controlled by the principles of His gospel ; 
when science, philosophy, art and literature shall 
interpret and enshrine eternal truth; when every 
nation and tribe shall swing into majestic line 
until all earth’s inhabitants are marching beneath 
His banner, and singing: “Worthy is the 
Lamb that hath been slain to receive power 
and riches, wisdom and might and honor and 
glory and blessing” — does He not see of the 
travail of His soul and is He not satisfied in 
the Contemplation? 

Here and now “the church of the living God” 
which the Apostle calls “the pillar and ground of 
truth” is the agent and instrumentality — through 
which Christ works to accomplish His will in this 
world. There is nothing mystic about this term 
Church. When used in its appropriate and re- 
ligious sense it has one fixed and definite meaning 
in the New Testament. It means a society of 
believers, or an assembly of the people of God. 
The vitality, effectiveness and aggressive power 
of the Church depend upon the spirituality of her 
members. You and I are coworkers with Christ. 
Let us not find an excuse for our inactivity in 
what we may deem the littleness of our influence. 
In God’s universe there is room for the lichen 
that clings to the rock and the giant pine that 
towers above the dimensions of a Cathedral spire; 


The Satisfying Vision 203 

for the tiny violet of a brief summer and the 
banyan tree that covers acres with its profound 
shadow and outlasts empires and nations. 

In God’s universe there is a mission for the 
little insect that flutters out its brief existence in 
the sunshine of a single day and the mighty finner 
whale that can sail through seas where the stout- 
est vessel would perish. So in Christ’s Church 
there is room for every variety of talent, for a 
Mary who anoints her Master’s head 2 a Dorcas 
who adorns the doctrine of the gospel by her 
needle in practical sympathy for the poor and a 
Tychicus who carried some letters for the im- 
prisoned Apostle to his friends, as well as for the 
brilliant Isaiah and the seraphic John. As in a 
battle victory depends on each soldier faithfully 
and heroically doing his duty, so in a measure on 
you, the progress, glory and ultimate triumph of 
Christ’s Kingdom depends. Deeds of unselfish 
love tell. As seeds have been carried to isles in 
the ocean before they were ever pressed by human 
foot, and vegetation has flowered where no 
sower’s hand could reach; so saving truth may be 
borne silently into a human heart on the at- 
mosphere of a holy life which neither the reason- 
ing of man nor the eloquence of an angel could 
reach and move. 

O Jesus, mighty lover of souls, let us feel the 
inspiring touch of thy Spirit so that we may be 


204 The World's Greatest Classic 

able to say with all sincerity — “God forbid that 
I should glory save in the cross of our Lord 
Jesus Christ.” 


BY THE SAME AUTHOR 


BEYOND THE STARS; or Human Life in 
Heaven. 

“It is not often that we take up so satisfactory a 
treatise on the future life as this. The author discusses 
the subject in ten brief chapters, which raise successively 
the all-important practical questions as to which light is 
needed. He bases himself on the utterances of the Scrip- 
tures, and with a rare and gratifying self-restraint neither 
allows himself to press these indications on into extreme 
speculative conclusions nor to surrender too easily any- 
thing of the positive affirmations and implications fairly 
concerned in them. Dr. McCullagh’s discussion of the 
spiritual body and the resurrection body, of the relation 
of the saints to the general judgment to each 

other and to friends left behind them on earth, are all 
in the best, soberest, and most satisfactory strain of 
edifying exposition.” — Independent. 

THE PEERLESS PROPHET; or, Life and Times 
of John the Baptist. 











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